Madeira Mondays: A cheap and delicious 18th century recipe

April 27, 202018 Comments

I love potatoes. Mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, potato chips…they’re all great.

Today I wanted to share with you a super simple recipe for potato pancakes from the 18th century which I discovered on the brilliant YouTube channel Townsends, where they recreate 18th century recipes. As the host John Townsend says in his introduction to this recipe:

Potatoes were an important part of the diet of the 18th century in Great Britain and in North America. They were important especially for the poorer sort of folks who didn’t have those expensive foods available.

The recipe Townsend uses is originally from 1732 and, as he mentions in the video, it was a recipe you might use if you were eating a lot of potatoes and wanted to vary up how you cooked them. Or if you had old potatoes lying around. Or if wheat was too expensive. Apparently this recipe shows up in lots of different cookbooks of the time (he quotes from Primitive Cookery from 1767, which was a recipe book filled with inexpensive recipes).

Like everyone else, I’ve been in quarantine and thought now would be the perfect time to give this super affordable and tasty looking recipe a go!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I love making 18th century food and drink, partly for book research and partly because it’s fun! Sometimes that turns out really well, like the time I made syllabub. Sometimes, the results are less appetizing, like the time I made ‘Flip’!

These potato pancakes were a moderate success (I’ll tell you more on that below), but, for now, let’s get into how I made these. This is my version of the recipe, inspired by the 18th century recipe I mentioned above and from Townsend’s video. Enjoy!

Potato Pancakes from 1732

Ingredients:

Some potatoes (it really depends on how many cakes you want to make. We used three medium sized potatoes)
Salt
Milk (about 1/4 cup)
Butter

And that’s it. If you think it sounds like we’re making mashed potatoes, you’re pretty much right!

How to make them

Step 1: Peel the potatoes and cut into bite-sized pieces.

Step 2: Boil the potato pieces for about 15 minutes or until they’re tender. Then drain and let them cool.

Step 3: Mash them!

Step 4: Add a big pinch of salt and a splash of milk (maybe like 1/4 cup or a teeny bit more, depending on how many potatoes you have). NB Don’t put too much milk here. You want the potatoes to retain a doughy consistency and if you add too much milk, they’re gonna be too runny).

Step 5: Add butter to a hot pan (like you’d do for typical pancakes)

Step 6: Flatten the potatoes into little pancakes.

Step 7: Then put them into the pan. Flip them like pancakes after a minute or two on each side. They should be golden brown.

And that’s it! Serve hot.

As you can see, they turned out pretty well in the end! They were a bit like hash browns, only more compact. We ate them with mustard, which wasn’t especially period appropriate for a poorer sort of 18th century person’s diet, but it was delicious. You could of course have them with ketchup. Or any sort of dipping sauce. I really wanted to try eating them with apple sauce and I realized that was because they reminded me a bit of latkes which I always ate with apple sauce at a friend’s for Hanukkah.

So the trickiest thing about cooking this, we found, was trying to keep the potatoes together when they were frying in the pan. Now, I grew up in the USA and I’ve had some experience flipping good ol’ American style breakfast pancakes, so I didn’t have as much trouble with this. But if you’re not as used to flipping pancakes, it might take some practice. I’d say: don’t flip too soon. And it’s a process of trial and error (our first few were definitely the messiest).

The real problem is that they don’t have flour to keep them all stuck together and make a heartier dough. But that was ‘authentic’ to the recipe, which was eaten by folks who would have made cakes like these if flour wasn’t something that they could afford. This is not like the sweet, rich and decadent syllabub recipe I made. This is hearty, simple food that will fill you up.

For me, these pancakes were, overall, pretty good. But my partner seemed to really enjoy them. So they’re worth trying out one afternoon if you fancy it and definitely let me know if you do!

Madeira Mondays: The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (R through Z)

February 3, 20203 Comments

This is the final installment in my series of three posts looking at historical slang words! The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose (1811) has been an endlessly entertaining historical source, a compendium of ‘vulgar’ phrases, swears, oaths, insults, drinking games and much more. If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can find them here and here.

Now I’m pulling out the best words in this unusual little dictionary from the letters R-Z. I hope that you enjoy them and let me know which is your favorite. Mine is probably ‘sea lawyer’ and ‘spoil pudding’. Happy reading!

RIGMAROLE. Roundabout, nonsensical. He told a long rigmarole story. (Good to see that this one has stuck around! Although I often hear it used more in the context of something being long and complicated, e.g. ‘signing up for that thing required filling in lots of papers, it was a huge rigamarole!’)

SAINT GEOFFREY’S DAY. Never, there being no saint of that name: tomorrow-come-never, when two Sundays come together. (See you on St Geoffrey’s Day aka NEVER!)

SANDWICH. Ham, dried tongue, or some other salted meat, cut thin and put between two slices of bread and butter: said to be a favourite morsel with the Earl of Sandwich. (I thought it was interesting that a sandwhich was a recent enough food that they felt they had to include a definition of it, plus the fact that this definition pretty much still holds!)

SEA LAWYER. A shark. (I guess back then people were already poking fun at lawyers a lot. But I mostly included this one because it makes me picture a shark in a business suit.)

TO SHOOT THE CAT. To vomit from excess of liquor; called also catting.

SLY BOOTS. A cunning fellow, under the mask of simplicity.

SPOIL PUDDING. A parson who preaches long sermons, keeping his congregation in church till the puddings are overdone. (I’ve certainly been to some lectures given by ‘spoil puddings’!)

TARRING AND FEATHERING. A punishment lately inflicted by the good people of Boston on any person convicted, or suspected, of loyalty: such delinquents being “stripped naked”, were daubed all over with tar, and afterwards put into a hogshead of feathers. (I included this one mostly because of its connection to the American Revolution. This was something that Patriot mobs did to Loyalist citizens.)

British propaganda print from 1774: The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man. The print depicts a customs official being tarred and feathered by a Patriot mob.

VICE ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. A drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes. (You will recall from my first post about this dictionary that an ‘Admiral of the Narrow Seas’ is one who throws up on someone across from him from drunkenness. So the VICE admiral is someone who pees on someone’s shoes. Both are oddly specific and I wouldn’t want to go drinking with either of these ‘admirals’, I have to say.)

WHIPT SYLLABUB. A flimsy, frothy discourse or treatise, without solidity. (This entertained me because syllabub was a popular dessert drink which involved whipped cream. So this phrase obviously alludes to that!)

WOLF IN THE STOMACH. A monstrous or canine appetite.

YANKEY, or YANKEY DOODLE. A booby, or country lout: a name given to the New England men in North America. A general appellation for an American.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more discussion of this book in a future post when I talk about the origins of the Revolutionary War-era song ‘Yankee Doodle’.

(Featured Image: ‘A Midnight Modern Conversation’ by William Hogarth c. 1730 via Wikipedia Commons)

Madeira Mondays is a series of blog posts exploring Early American history and historical fiction. I’m not a historian, but an author and poet who is endlessly fascinated by this time period. I am also currently writing/researching a novel set during the American Revolution and recently finished a Doctorate of Fine Art looking at how creative writers access America’s eighteenth-century past. Follow the blog for a new post every Monday and thanks for reading!

Madeira Mondays: Syllabub Recipe

November 4, 2019November 4, 20195 Comments

You probably already know that people in early America were drinking alcohol. But you might be surprised to know just how much of it they were drinking. Water wasn’t sanitary to drink, so they were boozing it up big time in the thirteen colonies with ales, ciders, wines (like Madeira!) and strong rum punches. What you drank and where you drank it varied by gender and class (an elite lady, for instance, wouldn’t be swigging pints of ale in a tavern), but alcohol was flowing very freely during this time. As food writer Corin Hirsch says in Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England:

‘From the mid-1600s on, a New England rota looked like this: At breakfast, wash down some brown bread and sliced cheese with a pewter tankard of hard cider, the equivalent of two pints of beer. Work didn’t proceed far before a late-morning break (…) an occasion for a glass of beer or another of cider. Lunch necessitated more booze, as did the afternoon break, supper and evening socializing in the local ordinary (aka tavern). A birth? Drink. A wedding. Drink some more.’

You get the idea.

Now, as a writer and as a person, I am deeply interested in food and drink, so for the last few months I’ve been trying to recreate some 18^th century recipes and that includes drink recipes. And one of the easiest and most fun drinks that I’ve made is syllabub.

Homemade syllabub! Check out those cool layers.

If you’re living in the UK you might be familiar with this drink (which I’ve heard is still served occasionally at restaurants and I actually found this Nigella Lawson recipe for an Amaretto syllabub, bringing an Italian spin on this English drink), but if you’re in the USA or elsewhere chances are you probably haven’t. But it was a very popular drink in 18^th century America and the best way that I can describe it is that it’s basically like an alcoholic Frappuccino. And as someone who personally doesn’t always love super creamy beverages, I am a huge fan of this particular drink and have made it at several parties now and it’s always a crowd pleaser. It also looks impressive but is easy to prepare and I wanted to share my recipe with you.

I think recipes are sort of like fairy tales in that there isn’t really an ‘original’, just many different iterations, but it’s useful to think about where your version comes from. The way I like to make syllabub is inspired by this video from brilliant re-enactor/YouTuber Jas Townsend on his YouTube Channel. Really worth a watch if you’re into history or cooking or both. They make 18^th century recipes! He was following a recipe (or ‘receipt’, as it would have been called back then) from Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, 1739. But I have also seen a short recipe for it in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife or, Methodical Cook, 1860. As I mentioned, it was a pretty common drink/dessert.

Recipe for syllabub from The Virginian Housewife

So I took those as inspiration, but slightly modernized it to use Prosecco instead of white wine. The reason for that is that I think the bubbles bring a nice lightness to the drink (contrasting with the heavy cream) and also it’s much easier to whip by hand if you’re using something with bubbles in it (like cider or Prosecco). Also because I love Prosecco.

Syllabub Recipe

Ingredients (for 4 glasses of syllabub):

– 1 bottle of Prosecco (or white wine or cider)

– 2 lemons

– 1/2 cup sugar

– 2 cups heavy cream

– nutmeg

Note on the measurements: these are very approximate and if you don’t have a measuring cup, you could always just use a mug for coffee or tea to measure things out.

How to make it:

Fill glasses up halfway with Prosecco (or white wine or cider)
In a separate mixing bowl, add one cup of Prosecco, the juice of both lemons, ½ cup of sugar and stir until dissolved together.
Add the 2 cups of heavy cream to the mixing bowl and whip together until it becomes thickened like whipped cream! (NB This might take a while if you’re doing it by hand. Maybe 10-15 minutes. You could also use an electric mixer if you have one and want to save time).
Spoon the foamy whipped cream topping into the glasses over the top of the Prosecco. It should float on top. If it sinks, you haven’t whipped it long enough.
Add a sprinkle of nutmeg and a squirt of lemon over the top of each drink.
Serve!

A great non-alcoholic version could also be made with grape juice or apple juice.

As you drink it, you can stir it up together and eat it with a spoon, more like a custard, or eat the foam and then drink the wine after – it’s entirely up to you.

I’ve heard of other ways of making this, including using egg whites, but this is my favorite way. The lemon makes everything taste bright and fresh, not too heavy, and balances out nicely with the cream. The nutmeg on top also looks cool but adds an unusual and very authentic 18^th century taste to it (it was a very popular spice in the 18^thcentury kitchen).

I’d serve this as a dessert drink after dinner because it’s quite sweet. Another cool thing about it is that it would be good in the winter, a bit like eggnog, or summer, like a Frappuccino. In The Compleat Housewife, 18th century writer Eliza Smith suggests it for June, but I think it would be fun for a winter holiday party too.

Syllabub! Apologies for the slightly blurry image. Blame it on the Prosecco I was sipping as I made the drink.

Let me know if you’ve had this before or if you end up making it, I’d love to see! It really is a crowd pleaser because of its striking, layered look and is super simple to prepare. You can impress people with your knowledge of historic drinks and then booze it up like it’s 1770.

Cheers!

Carly Brown

Author. Poet. Time Traveler.

Tag: syllabub