the stranger end of the culinary arts

My father's family once had their own recipes for Christmas pudding and Christmas cake. My cousins (somewhat older than me) remember eating them at my grandmother's. When she died, however, no-one in the next generation knew how to make them. Being Jewish changed, I guess, and so the family lost an important slice of its foodways.

I found that slice again when I started work on using Anglo-Australian Jewish traditions in a novel and bequeathed a character my fascination with historical foodways. My mother was the one who made the discovery. From the same source as Perceval (worrying, when you contemplate it from that angle) she found the recipe book we hadn't known my grandmother kept. I have (for the next 2 years) the books my Auntie Joan had and which I had privileged access to a few years back - it is really strange to have them now (I miss Auntie Joan; sorry, today is very digressive) but my Auntie Joan's notebook of Grandma Polack's was really the overflow aspect. A Page on this and a page on that. Desserts and chicken-laying and a recipe for soap. We didn't know there was a notebook containing the core recipes. We assumed there wasn't, in fact, because of a comment my Great-Aunt Augusta made in 1939 about my cousin Edith needing to read books to cook.

Anyway, there was a book, and Mum produced it with a flourish when I was researching Secret Jewish Women's Business, and lo!, it contained the missing recipes.

I want to cook them. Either the cake or the pudding this year and the other one next. Once they have been cooked (for the first time in over half a century) I am happy to post them here. I want to cook them first, though.

Anyone game? Think nineteenth century English fruitcake and pudding - one of the best periods for that sort of stuff. Rich and decadent. Probably heart-attack-inducing. Definitely ideologically unsound. Perfect for a silly Sunday.

I want to cook in cohort because company is fun, but also because I can only eat a single slice of such things (and only if I don't tell my doctor) so it is as much eating the end product as cooking it and making inroads into my wine cabinet. We would divvy up the shopping and the product fairly, and I would provide suitable music. My best thought currently for suitable music is Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish, Renaissance Christmas music and Lauris Elms singing Victoriana.

(no subject)

I am in the mood for old recipes.

Here is Grandma Polack's recipe for strawberry icecream. When I was a child our home-made icecream was poured into a sandwich tin, half frozen, beaten and then the icecream sat in the freezer overnight. Sometimes you did the beating process more than once, but mostly we forgot. I have no idea if the recipe works for an ice-cream maker because I have never used one. What I dreamed of back then was one of the nineteenth century icecream makers, not the modern electric variety.

Take 1 lb picked & hulled strawberries, sprinkle with 1/4 lb castor sugar & crush. Add a tablespoon lemon juice & let stand 1 hr. Put through sieve. Whip 1/2 pint cream & add. Also 6 blanched & chopped almonds. Freeze.