Sunday's Plate

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. - Ruskin

This is the forward to the original Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book. It's one of my finds while I was having some adult down time at one of my favorite haunts - Feather Your Nest.

What I like best about this book is that it actually teaches you how to begin at the beginning with things we take for granted. When modern recipe books read: add two eggs to the vanilla cake mix, you know that you are placing and pressing the tiles to cooking, but you are not really cooking.

In the FF Cook Book, it begins at the beginning as with salad dressing, and it tells you how to make your own mayonnaise. In fact it assumes you will be making mayonnaise because it was not available to buy back then.

One of the things I love making for my husband is stuffed baked trout. I had to teach myself how to bone fish, and now I see what I was doing wrong. Years ago, I am sure that many men brought fish home to their wives, or vice versa, and this job of preparing fresh fish was one of a gazillion jobs that women did routinely. Today, most women would laugh. But the taste of whole baked fish stuffed with delicate stuffings made from ground assorted breads and vegetables and seasoned with fresh garden herbs is too good to laugh at. The missing link for me was to cut the fin off with a small strip of skin the entire length of the fish. The boning is easy with a very sharp boning knife swept from tail to head just under the rib cage of the fish. You pull out the bones in a strip.

One of the baking gems of this book is a complete and detailed list of cake fillings and frostings. No more limits! There are two dozen different flavors and all of them are natural. It's a feast! And there are dozens of cakes to bake separated by sponge and cup and pound. The book goes on to talk a lot about oven temperature, mixing and bowls. A cake should always be made in a earthen bowl. Of course all of these things were made without appliances.

There are many recipes for confections, and one I would like to make for the kids is called spun sugar. You make the sugar over broom handles.

One of the wonderful extras in the book is the ads. There is an add for kitchen equipment called Choice House Furnishings by F.A. Walker & Co. The ad advertises things I never heard of like: Marmites, Hateletts, paste cutters, Parisian potato cutters and more.

So glad to get the book. So funny to read, so informing...I always tell the children to begin at the beginning to clearly understand what they are doing. It's no different with adults and the activities in the adult life. By beginning at the beginning, and learning to work from scratch, anything is possible without a hurried trip to the store...