Posted on 12/15/2017 4:39:44 PM PST by Jamestown1630
While enduring a ‘bug’ this week that left me unable to do much but sleep or sit in front of the TV, I happened upon Clarissa Dickson Wright’s series, ‘Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner’, which you can find on YouTube, and which is a really interesting history of how our 'three squares', and the ways we partake of them, have evolved over time.
In the Lunch episode, she featured a pasty (yes, no 'r') crust design, executed by food scholar Ivan Day. This was so beautiful, I had to find the design, and know more about it.
On the way, I found some interesting stuff – including Day's great website on historic food:
http://www.historicfood.com/portal.htm
The pasty design seems to have been derived from Edward Kidder’s ancient ‘Receipts of pastry and cookery, for the use of his scholars’, published in 1720 (you can still buy a copy on Amazon ;-):
http://www.historicfood.com/Edward%20Kidders%20Lamb%20Pasty.htm
I’m not personally a fan of British pasties; but it seems to me that we could decorate our sweet or savory pies just as beautifully – it just takes practice, and starting small! And you don’t need cutters to do this; just find a design, make a cardboard cutout of it, and find a sharp knife to cut the pastry to each of the shapes; then do some detail on the pieces.
Food52 has a lot of starter ideas for ‘fancying up’ your pie:
https://food52.com/blog/8744-9-ways-to-fancy-up-your-pies
-JT
Merry Christmas to you!
I’ve seen some beautiful kitchens with gas cooktops, sometimes made out of antique cooktops; and electric wall-ovens for baking; and I like that idea.
I haven’t explored all of this sufficiently, but I don’t think I’d ever get the Husband Unit away from his love of cast-iron hitting actual FIRE ;-)
Cast iron Dutch Oven cooking is your answer.
I’m the same way, the kitchen here is all electric so I grill outside on gas whenever I can invent a reason to do so. But, given that the kitchen is all electric, a countertop induction cooktop brings a lot to the table, it behaves somewhat similarly to gas as far as precision and speed.
Don’t forget the meat LOL
Kinda intuitive
Cast iron is wonderful in many ways
I like to make crock pot soups for the winter too - and chili!
Peanutgallery used to make cobbler in a dutch oven with coals on the top at our shoots and folks raved about it..
Musta been excellent it was always gone when I got there LOL
SNARF it’s gone!
I’m in CA and it’s really cold today. It was all the way down to 73 degrees today.
One of the tricks is to get the dutch oven hot but not burning hot. Then put just three or four coals on top while it is sitting just above a bed of coals with some air space between them. It’s an oven not a foundry — we’re not trying to make bricks — I used to tell my Scouts.
Never used one, used lots of cast iron skillets.
Its an art
Oh and you cant make decent corn bread without cast iron
Well, I think exposure to really cold temps and wind are what made me sick beginning Tuesday, here. I’m basically a hot-house plant, and would love to live somewhere that’s warm all the time.
As long as I could get away to snow, for a few days at Christmas time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH2KGboA35c
This is true.
(Put some jalapenos in that corn bread ;-)
I’m getting ready to make smoked Hungarian kolbasz.
My father knew a man who made his own Kolbasz and gave it to us sometimes.
Do you make your sausage from scratch?
Now for cooking inside (no coals on top, LOL) I think the guilty pleasure is a La Creuset oval dutch over, the bigger the better.
They are very heavy to handle but they cook like nothing else and clean up great.
Cook a small turkey, a stew, a pot roast, a ciappino, a twelve fishes, a sausage pot dinner, or anything. My wife can’t handle it due to the weight but she loves it as well as long as I move it and clean it when she uses it. But mostly its mine and I think of anchovies, garlic, onions — did I say garlic?
Hope you’re feeling better now. Bugs are the worst. That pastry is amazing, but just no. I do cut out hearts & stars from the pastry to decorate my pies. Because I love stars & have a tiny heart cutter.
My husband buys ham hocks in his Pennsylvania hometown, to make his ham and bean soup (he doesn’t like the ones he gets here in Maryland supermarkets, they’re too puny).
It’s always very good; but I’m not crazy about potatoes in the soup - I think it would be better with the potatoes left out, and more carrots - and you can use potato flakes to thicken things up...
I don’t ever use potatoes in ham and bean soup. We also like just plain ham and beans - navy or great northern with a big slice of cornbread and butter, and a slice of onion.
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