Happy St Patrick’s day, and welcome to a history-packed post!
My genes are predominantly composed of a mix between Scandinavian and Celtic roots, and as such, I am Irish. In honor of St Patrick’s day and my Celtic roots, I thought I would talk about some Irish American history; specifically during the American Civil War.
There are two big mistakes you could make when thinking about Irish involvement in the Civil War. One would be to simply overlook it; MANY Irish immigrants fought and died on both sides. While the other would be to think of it as glory-laden, war is messy, politics doubly so.
I want to start by saying that the Irish were highly flawed, most of them were not only fine with slavery, but even in favor of it, and displayed the racism which most people associate with the South during the Civil War, so that you don’t get the wrong idea off of the bat, BUT…
Immediately before the Civil War broke out, Ireland went through the Great Potato Famine, which wiped out almost 1/3 of the population, one way which the Irish managed to survive was to immigrate in America. But when they got here, they were treated horribly, the strong anti-Irish sentiments at that time kept them from finding employment, or even found them doing jobs deemed too dangerous for even slaves, and starving in the new world was not preferable to starving at home, so many entered the war, and those who didn’t were later conscripted. And even after fighting and dying in the Civil War, the Irish continued to get a bum rap for several decades. (There’s much more to this story and I would encourage you to look into it! I would also recommend you listen to “By the hush” an actual Civil War song about Irish conscription. But I’m gonna move on for now.)
So in honor of the rough trip, many Irish Americans had throughout the Civil War, and their often ignored struggles, (and the fact that I couldn’t find any historical Irish cookbooks,) I decided to have a Civil War-era bake day.
As always I tried to keep to 2 big rules.
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.
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.
These recipes were taken from “What to do with the cold mutton: a book of Réchauffés.” Published in New York in 1865, the year the war ended. And this time, for fun, I invited a friend who happens to love baking over to help! And just like last time, I had a marvelous kitchen elf named “mom” to help me as well.
Needless to say at this point, some things didn’t go as expected, so here as our menu as it technically should have read (there were also green beans on it originally, but we straight up forgot to make them, so I pulled them off for accuracy.)
Breakfast: Ravensworth pudding- An apple “pudding”, (think English puddings, not wet and squishy, more like bread pudding.)
Lunch: Soupe à la bonne femme- “Soup of the good woman” Basically potato soup.
Dinner: Roman pudding-Basically macaroni and cheese with rabbit added, (we used vegan chicken.)
Dessert: Strawberry Soufflé.
Let’s go through the day chronologically shall we?
I started the apples for the Ravensworth pudding at about 8:00, they needed to be cooked through and cooled before I could start much, and my friend arrived at 9:00, just in time to help me “pulp” the apples. At that point, we realized that we should have already toasted some bread to make crumbs, and proceeded to spend the next half hour or so trying to toast and crumb some freaking bread. Gluten-free bread doesn't toast well to start with, but even by those standards this was ridiculous.)
After we had stuck the Ravensworth pudding in the oven to cook for an hour and a half, we started the Soupe à la bonne femme, which had some odd instructions of its own. I decided to make an executive decision that cooking onions for a full half-hour was madness, so we fried them up and tossed them in the boiling broth. The really odd instruction came in here; we were supposed to fry the potatoes BEFORE tossing them in the soup, and, that is exactly what we did, albeit with a little confusion.
By the time the potatoes were cooked up, (it took many batches to finish frying all of the potatoes) the soup was nearly done, but there was still about 45 minutes till the pudding was done, and there were loudly growling stomachs to address by that time, so we went ahead and ate the soup-lunch, BEFORE the pudding-breakfast.
All in all, both of these dishes were well received, we could see exactly why the potatoes were pre-cooked, as this imparted a delicious raw-fry type taste, and we were all quite glad to have officially become “good women” by making this soup together, and the Ravensworth pudding was amazing.
Two success under our belts, we gathered our confidence to stand united against my old foe; Soufflé.
This time the instructions told us to beat the egg whites to “snow” which we all agreed was quite vivid imagery, and much more descriptive than “stiff peaks”, and we set to work.
Once this rather exhausting task was completed we took to the stovetop, melting butter and cooking jam and milk together. Once these many parts were combined into an oddly fluffy looking batter, we poured about half of it into a soufflé pan, while the other half was chucked slightly less ceremoniously into a dish in the oven to cook, and proceeded to play peek-a-boo through the oven window for the next hour as it cooked. We chattered and wondered at what would come out, although there was no way to predict what would happen next.
The first of the two came out much like the last Soufflé I attempted, without an abhorrent amount of salt that it, while the other dish, being a little larger, and oval rather than a circular thick sided dish needed to cook a little longer. Once the second Soufflé (which was BREATHING!) came out we decided to try a little bit, to see if it cooked any differently… and as it happened it came out completely opposite to the other, as you can see in the photo. But what the photo fails to show is that they even TASTED different! While the first was sweet and almost a little fruity, almost like some sort of sweet bread in flavor, the second tasted like straight sweet butter! It was quickly agreed that some sort of scientifically impossible transformation had happened.
After this confusing episode, we started dinner, which as you can probably guess by now, had a rather strange instruction. We were to “sprinkle vermicelli and place paste around the edges of the pan.” I misread this to mean that we were meant to paste the raw vermicelli (spaghetti, they don’t seem to make gluten-free vermicelli) around the edges of the dish decorative, although I’m still not exactly sure what was meant by this, with hindsight I’m sure that it didn’t mean this, as the paste burned quite badly, and the paste remained completely raw.
With the exception of this massive error on my part, the Roman pudding was a success, quite good, although it tasted more like a hot dish than macaroni and cheese.
It seems that with every historical bake day, I grow as a baker, and I certainly use the failures as a chance to continue practicing the ancient art of laughing at myself. All in all, this was a great bake day, with nothing being inedible, and we all enjoyed a wonderful time to laugh and hang out together. And if I may go this far, I think that we are all beginning to grow a deeper appreciation for the housewives of old, and envy for the bulging biceps that they must have had with all of that mixing. Although I’m also sure that somewhere, a Victorian lady is rolling over in her grave at those three fools who put RAW pasta on the sides of the pan, and we are rolling with her, although we’re rolling in laughter.
Happy St Patrick's day, and thanks for the read!
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