Victorian recipes

All right, here we go:

From The Boston Cook Book, 1884 by Mrs. D. A. Lincoln

Pound Cake by Miss Ward
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
10 eggs
1 pound flour
1/2 wineglass wine
1/2 wineglass brandy

Cream the butter; add the sugar, yolks of the eggs, wine, brandy, whites of the eggs, and the flour. Put currants into one fourth of the dough and almonds, blanched and pounded in rose water, into another part. Leave the remainder plain. Fill very small round tins three quarters full. Into half of those containing the plain dough put small pieces of citron, three in each, inserting the citron upright a little way into the dough. Sift sugar over the tops of those containing the citron and almond before putting them into the oven. Bake twenty minutes. Frost the plain and currant cakes. Pound cake is lighter when baked in small cakes than in loaves.
**Notes from Michelle:
Notice how she didn’t have an oven temperature?? I imagine it must have been very hard to cook without any way of knowing how hot the oven would be. Also, half the ingredients were in the directions and not the initial list of ingredients. What is citron? Candied lemon?? And rose water? I’m guessing she was making the equivalent of almond extract.

For Larissa–a pastry recipe: I looked up pie crust, and this is what they called it:

Puff Paste:
One pound of the best butter, one pound of pastry flour, one scant teaspoonful of salt, about one cup of ice water. By measure, use one quart of flour and one pint of butter. Scald the bowl, then fill with cold water. Dip the hands into hot and then into cold water; this makes bowl and hands smooth, and keeps the butter from sticking. Wash the butter, by working it in the cold water, till soft and waxy. Divide into four parts; pat each part into a long and narrow piece and wrap in a clean napkin.
Have three shallow oblong pans that will fit the one into the other. Fill the largest and smallest of the pans with broken ice. Put the butter, covered with the napkin, into the other and place it etween teh two pans of ice to harden. Mix the salt with the flour, then break in one quarter of the butter. Rub with the tips of the fingers, and keep plenty of flour between the fingers and the butter. Many prefer to chop it, that the warmth of the hand may not soften the butter. When teh butter and flour are well mixed, and fine and dry lik emeal, pour in the cup of ice water slowly. Mix with a knife and cut, rather than stir. Wet only part of the flour at first and toss it to one side of the bowl, then wet another part; and when it is all of the proper consistency, cut and mix it together till it can be taken up clean from teh bowl with the knife. Add the last of the water cautiously, wetting only the dry flour an duse less or more than the cupful as the flour may require. If the butter be softened by the heat in rubbing, it will moisten the flour, and less water will be required. But it should not be allowed to soften. The mixture should be light and dry, like separate minute crumbs of butter coated iwth flour.
Use a large smooth rolling-board and a glass rolling-pin. Put half a cup of flour in the dredger, and sprinkle the middle of the board with a light coating of flour. Toss the ball of paste in the flour with a knife until floured all over, then pat with the rolling-pin into a flat cake an inch thick. Have the end of the board next you, that you may roll the paste the required length. Hold the handles of the pin firmly, and roll with a light quick stroke as far as your arms with allow, the whole length of the paste…
(Okay, this goes on for another two pages of directions.) Basically you put butter all over it, fold it, pound it, and add more butter. You keep folding and rolling until no streaks of butter can be seen. The dough must be icy cold when you put it in the often.

Now this sounds to me like the recipe for puff pastry, but they used this for pie crust, too! Interesting… She then goes on to describe different ways of cutting the pastry for tarts (pies), and so on. She recommends if you make fruit pies with stewed fruit, to bake the pie crust separately, stew the fruit, fill, and put the two together. I can only imagine how many calories were in these kinds of pies!