A Victorian experiment

Hello and welcome again to my blog!

As I have mentioned a few times I am a massive history buff, I love a good documentary, and will research any little question that comes to mind, as I have also mentioned I’m an aspiring writer, as a matter of fact, I am in the middle of editing a steampunk novel that I wrote, so I’ve been spending a lot of time sinking my teeth into the Victorian era lately. (Don’t worry this will all make sense in a minute.) A while ago I also discovered a few reality tv shows where people are submerged into the lives of people from different time periods, and I love them, with this all in mind I decided to spend one full day cooking Victorian meals, in a semi-authentic way! Although I should note here that my “One day” turned into two, as I ran out of time, patience, and nerves.

I really had only two rules going into this:

1. As much as possible, keep to tools that were already around, IE I needed to use my stove and oven, but the stand mixer? Nope. The rubber scraper? (as I’m not sure when that was originally created) Not really a need no.  
2. Use authentic recipes as much as possible. Being one of two vegetarians with two gluten sensitivities as well as living in a house FULL of lactose intolerances, some things did need to be tweaked.

To keep as much authenticity as possible all the recipes (except the bread) were taken from the Mary Ronald’s Century cook book, published 1899. So without any further ado, here is my experiment.

For breakfast, we had Cornmeal mush, with an orange omelet, and a cup of tea, (Irish breakfast, with a little bit of evaporated milk, a personal favorite). So, um, I’m gonna be honest here, I hadn't personally read through the recipes in their entirety, so I ran into a few surprises right away. First I was instructed to mix the cornmeal mush for A HALF AN HOUR! Without any sort of indication of how hot the stove ought to be, don’t get me wrong here, I didn’t expect any sort of exact temperature, but, having read a few Victorian cookbooks before, I assumed that I would AT LEAST be instructed in whether it was a “high flame” or something of the sort. So I winged it… unsuccessfully, I ran the stove too hot, and cooked it too fast, after only ten minutes I didn’t dare cook it any longer, as it already looked like stiff wallpaper paste. Then I began the omelet… oh that cursed omelet. I had NO IDEA that I would have to pre-beat the whites and with no indication of how much? I was also instructed to “fold” them, so I knew that I would need at least some peaks forming, but soft peaks? Stiff peaks? No clue and I’m still not certain whether or not it turned out correctly.

Nerves somewhat shaken, and not having finished making BREAKFAST until after noon, (there were plenty of snacks and pre-prepared foods, so don’t worry, no one went hungry), I finally began making “lunch” which ended up being dinner, with as long as it took to cook, and with how long I had stalled in dread. :) Our “lunch” was composed of onion soup with fresh bread and baked apples with hand-whipped cream and nutmeg. Not as much happened that wasn't to be expected, except that it took a full HALF HOUR to whip the cream, I don’t mean in a jar either, I mean in a mason jar churn. (I shortened the process for you in this video,) My big brother, who works a physically demanding job lasted only FIVE of those minutes, while I, the smaller one managed the other twenty five-minutes!

Due to the time which it had taken to make my first two meals, I decided (with some prompting from my mom and brother,) to put off dinner and desert until the next day. Our dinner was composed of cream of corn soup, and tomatoes (pepper for my tomato-hating brother) stuffed with egg. The soup (unsurprisingly,) went exactly to plan, with no real problems. The tomatoes however, would NOT COOK! We put them a “moderate oven” which a quick Google search told us was about 360 degrees, after 30 minutes, (when it was supposed to be cook for 10) the egg was just BARELY beginning to cook, so we upped the temp to 400 and cooked it for 15 minutes more!  

With the end of my experiment finally, in sight, I faced my biggest obstacle yet: a vanilla souffle. My mom is by far the best cook and baker in my house, and yet she has yet to personally attempt a souffle, and no one in my house has even TASTED a proper souffle either! So I was rather dreading this task, but if I was going to finish on a bang, this was certainly a way to do it. If you have ever made a souffle, or know much about how to do so, then you know that you need your egg whites beaten to STIFF PEAKS, a process which usually takes about 20 exhausting minutes to do by hand. I knew this to start with and still wanted to do it anyways. (Yeah I’m crazy, and proud of it.) We’re pretty sure it was undercooked, by just a few minutes, as well as being downright salty, the texture I admit freely was probably my fault, the salt? Definitely the recipe, but my mom is eager to try again (with the aid of 21st-century tech of course.)

This was easily twice as much work as I thought it would be, and that’s not to say I didn’t expect work! Honestly, I expected this to be a fun little one day experiment, and it was a time-intensive, work-intensive, bout of insanity! I was pushed to the edges of my nerves, and beyond the edges of my kitchen skills, and my sanity suffered as well. However despite the time and work, I gained a deeper appreciation of Victorian housewives and cooks that is hard to explain, and now that I’ve had a little time to recover my wits, I am beginning to appreciate the adventure of my experiment much more than I did in the moment, and honestly, the humor of me losing my mind over a couple of seemingly innocent little eggs.