Because you are interested in the topics I cover here on Historical Foodways, I thought you might be interested in my new project, Passport to Eat, where I challenge myself to cook one dish from every country in the world.

There will be food, and for sure there will be history and culture, but not in the same context as here, which is why I felt it needed to be its own project and publication. It’s not a replacement for Historical Foodways, but rather a sister project. What can I say, I love complicating my life.

The fist article introducing this long-term project is now published. I hope you check it out and see if it’s something you’re interested in following along with.

Towards the middle of last year, I had been struggling with creating consistent work for Substack. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to, it was because I was not in the greatest place, emotionally speaking, in terms of my career prospects. As you may (or may not) know, I have a PhD in History, but before even graduating I made the decision not to go on the academic job market. That is, the market for jobs as a college professor, which is essentially what a PhD in History trains you for. I did this for a variety of reasons, but the most important two were that I didn’t want to leave NYC and an academic job, if I got it, would almost certainly require me to. The other reason was that there is no academic job market. There are no academic jobs, and getting one is almost like winning the lottery, especially in the tenure track.

At the time, I had a job teaching history at a private prep school here in NYC as an interim teacher. Close enough to what I studied, although I was teaching things that were not exactly my primary field of expertise. But that is often the case anyway. On the surface, everything seemed peachy. It was a job in a nice school, the pay was above average, there was no practical limits on resources, etc. But I wasn’t happy. I dreaded the 1+ hour commute before 7am every weekday morning. I also did not like teaching middle schoolers, if I’m being honest.

Despite the negatives, it was, as I said, good money, my immediate colleagues were great, and I generally like teaching. I would have continued to do that job for a long time, maybe even still. Except that the day before we were to go on Christmas break, the assistant principle told me they would not be renewing my contract for the following school year, and that they were telling me then so I had time to prepare for the next hiring cycle, which usually starts around February. I was shocked because just weeks before the same person had asked me if I had considered enrolling my child in the school, for which I’d receive a significant discount. That means a long-term commitment to the school. Not to mention the poor timing of the Christmas break. To be clear, this was a decision that took even my department chair by surprise. As far as any of us knew, there was no issues or complaints about my performance.

I left the meeting with all sorts of emotions. Shock, dismay, disappointment, relief. Mostly, I was not enamored with the idea of working for another five months at a place that did not want me back. After a discussion with my husband, we decided that it was the perfect time to leave teaching behind and concentrate on making a career in food media, which I had long been considering. I gave notice that I would not be returning after the break.

This career change to food media wasn’t entirely out of left field; remember that I am trained as an academic food historian and I’ve been writing Historical Foodways for lay audiences for many years. The transition to popular media as career made sense. It was at that time that I moved Historical Foodways from a rarely-updated blog-style website to Substack. I started posting twice a month, then eventually monetized, although that was minimal.

At the same time, I began applying to all sorts of food media, food writing, and culinary-related writing and editing jobs with pretty much no luck. Entry level, slightly more senior, everything in between. I got as far as the final interview with one place but that position went to someone else in the end. I also pitched food, travel, and culinary travel stories left and right, but, again, was met with silence. I did publish an article in Gastro Obscura, the food vertical of Atlas Obscura. Then I stopped pitching.

During that time, I noticed that so many of the jobs I was applying for wanted someone with writing chops, but also with formal culinary experience, which I did not have. After almost two years of being on the job market, I decided to go to culinary school. I was committed to this career, and if they wanted formal culinary training, formal culinary training I was going to get. At a community college, of course, because who has $50k to spare?

I started culinary school (well, pastry school, really) in September 2024, and kept publishing on Substack all along. I also kept applying to food media jobs. But nothing. Nothing. To say that I felt defeated is an understatement. Not only was I not getting so much as an interview, but other employed people in the field were being laid off, publications were closing, etc. And you can’t convince me that the only way to break into [food] media isn’t to know someone with hiring power or influence.

In June of last year, I had more or less given up on the idea of so much as breaking into food media as a career change, let alone actually making it a career. Where I had once felt hope, I felt … nothing, which is worse than despair. I want to make it clear that I was also applying for jobs outside of food media, because a girl has dreams, but a girl also has to make money to live. The job market is trash all over. To quiet the demons, I started a cottage microbakery selling sourdough bread and other baked goods, emphasizing tropical flavors because, hey, I’m Cuban. I went hard over the summer, and in August alone I did four pop-ups. I felt great, if tired. By that time, writing here had started to feel like a burden, and I did not like that feeling one bit. I didn’t deserve to feel that way, my work here didn’t deserve to make me feel that way, and you didn’t deserve it either. Growth on Substack had also been at a stagnant for a while, and so much of the debate around the platform’s issues were at the forefront of my thoughts. That was when I paused the paid subscription and made the last post. I thought this would be maybe for a couple of weeks or so. Maybe a month.

It was also at that time when the sort of job I had explicitly not looked for landed on my lap. Out of nowhere, I was offered a last-minute job as a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of US History at my alma mater. I had also worked there in various roles before coming to graduate school. I was hesitant at first because teaching college was a stage in my life I thought I had left behind for good. Never mind that that was precisely what I was trained to do. Then, of course, reason kicked in and I accepted the job, a decision that was made infinitely easier by the fact that they agreed I could teach online only, which meant I didn’t have to move out of NYC. At least for the first year. I sort of won the lottery, I guess. And it is not lost on me that many people probably feel about this the same way I feel about jobs in food media.

I want to make it clear that I like this job, I’m happy with it, I’m glad I took it, and I’ll hold on to it as long as I can, but taking it felt like I was going back to an old boyfriend because the new one turned out to be a cold, distant asshole. With the responsibilities of the new job, and my heart broken by the food media failure, despite doing all the things I was supposed to, the expected couple of weeks break from Historical Foodways turned into months and months.

In all those months, I haven’t been writing much, but I’ve been baking and cooking up a storm. I’ve been doing the microbakery thing, albeit as a slower pace, and I completed my culinary school internship, which means I am done with school. One perk of this job is the flexibility of the schedule, which leaves me with plenty of time to do other things, which wasn’t the case when I was teaching at the prep school. The degrees won’t be granted until June though. I have no expectations that I will get out of this degree what I initially set out to get, but I am nevertheless glad I went to culinary/pastry school. No matter what happens, it was something I had wanted to do pretty much my whole adult life. In fact, I am going to the Institute of Culinary Education’s Artisan Bread program starting in March. It lasts 8 weeks. I love bread, what can I say.

The truth is, I don’t know if I’m ready to come back to Historical Foodways in any consistent way, but I dropped off so abruptly, and leaving you hanging didn’t feel right. Now you know where I’ve been.

In my last post, In Defense of (Commercial) Yeast, I made the case that using a small amount of commercial yeast in sourdough doesn’t disqualify the bread from being “real” sourdough, and that many professional bakers, both in the past and in the present, use commercial yeast with intention and not out of laziness. Preferments are a big part of that conversation, and, spoiler, sourdough starter is only one of them.

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Somewhere along the sourdough renaissance during, and in the wake of, the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial yeast became the enemy. If you spend much time in sourdough Instagram, like I do given that I just opened a cottage microbakery, you’ll see self-appointed sourdough purists scrutinize the ingredient list of supermarket sourdough bread like frustrated Sherlock Holmeses. And their followers nod in the comment section. They are ready to declare a loaf sold as sourdough a fraud at the sight of … gasp … “yeast.” “Can you spot the problem?” They ask. “What is wrong here?” As if a pinch of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the species of commercial yeast, were a moral failing. Weirdly, of all of the other, sometimes problematic, ingredients, this is the hill they want to die on.

The reality is, commercial yeast does not categorically disqualify a bread from being “real sourdough.” And using a small amount of yeast in sourdough breads doesn’t mean the baker has cut corners. In fact, if you look through most reputable books aimed at professional bakers, you will see that sourdough formulas often include very small amounts of commercial yeast. You can look in Hans Welker’s Professional Bread Baking published by the Culinary Institute of America. In the highly revered Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes, by Jeffrey Hamelman. Or in Advanced Bread and Pastry: A Professional Approach, by Michel Suas. And in many other books, including some aimed at home bakers by trusted authorities in the bread world like Peter Reinhart. You will find sourdough breads, with entire levain builds, that use a very small amount of commercial yeast in the final dough. This is not a cheat, it’s a tool.

Even beloved bakeries like Radio Bakery in Brooklyn have openly stated that they add a small amount of yeast to their naturally leavened bread. It is not to speed things up, the amount of yeast is not enough for that, but to increase reliability. The yeast helps account for everything that an otherwise controlled environment can’t account for: inconsistent flour, temperature changes, and even an off day for the precious starter. All of it happens. And while it may not be a big deal at home, when you are making bread just for you and your family, it is a big deal at commercial scales. Customers expect consistency, and we all know sourdough can be temperamental. These are not industrial shortcuts; they are choices made by experienced, thoughtful bakers who care about consistency in their products.

Kelly Mencin, the chef and owner of Radio Bakery, is fully aware of this controversy so when she said they add yeast to their sourdough breads, she felt she needed to qualify that statement. In the Bon Appétit video about their focaccia, she said: “people are gonna say that Radio sourdough is not real sourdough because there’s yeast in it, but we use less than 2% of yeast in all of our bread because a little bit of just instant active yeast makes sure that our dough is consistent every single day.”

Even the levain baguette recipe from the Team USA 2008 of The Bread Baker’s Guild of America has a small amount of yeast. The recipe is by Solveig Tofte, dubbed the “queen of baguettes.”

To be clear, I am not saying that not using yeast in your sourdough breads is bad either, or that you must not care about consistency. What I am saying is that the sourdough cult – it sometimes feels like a cult – has taken this shaming of yeast to the extreme. To the point that even I, who am obviously aware of what’s happening, have felt shame, however fleeting, not for putting commercial yeast in my sourdough, which I don’t do, but for making and selling yeasted bread along with my sourdough at all! I have had to take a step back and recompose myself before I, too, fall into the trap.

A Tale of Two Leaveners

If you’re not a bread person, you might be thinking sourdough, yeast, tomato, tomahto. Fair. It is worth explaining the difference between commercial yeast and sourdough cultures, where they come from, and how they behave in bread.

Commercial yeast is a single species regardless of the form the yeast is in. It’s Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This yeast strain has been cultivated for reliability, fast gas production, and a neutral flavor. It is what you will find in packets at the supermarket, in glass jars if you want a bit more, in whole bags for large operations, and, if you’re really looking for it and are lucky, little rectangular cakes in the refrigerated section. It comes in a few different forms: active dry, instant, and fresh. Active dry yeast and instant yeast are granulated. One of them requires activating in liquid before adding to the other ingredients, and the other one doesn’t. They both last a really long time. Fresh yeast is far less common these days because it is highly perishable and requires refrigeration. Unless you are making a lot of bread and going through the yeast quickly, it makes more sense to buy the dry sort. There is also osmotolerant yeast, which is used in doughs with high sugar contents where regular yeast might struggle. Regardless of the form the yeast takes, it works the same. It’s fast, rising dough within a couple short hours. It also produces carbon dioxide and some alcohols as fermentation byproducts.

Sourdough cultures, on the other hand, are wild ecosystems of different yeasts and lactic acid bacteria, of which the most common strains are Lactobacillus. It also includes other species. Unlike commercial yeast, every sourdough culture is different in the types of organisms in it and in the balance of one versus the other. They vary from culture to culture, kitchen to kitchen, let alone region to region. Which is why we have such distinct styles like, famously, San Francisco sourdough. These microorganisms in the culture work much more slowly than commercial yeast, making the process drawn out. Sourdough bread is often referred to as long fermented bread, and it is, but long fermentation is not unique to sourdough. Plenty of yeasted breads are made with long fermentation too. In the process of breaking down the sugar in the flour, sourdough microorganisms create not just gas but also a range of acids that contribute to sourdough’s signature flavor.

When a baker adds a minuscule amount of commercial yeast to sourdough doughs, they are not replacing this ecosystem. What they are doing is giving the native yeasts a little boost, especially in conditions where they might be a bit sluggish. The sourdough bacteria are still there, they are still active, they are still producing the flavor and whatever benefits sourdough might have for your gut. The acid still develops. The long fermentation still happens. There is nothing lost or changed that would make this bread not sourdough now. And yet, many of these same people who villainize commercial yeast and criticize “fake sourdough’ go on to put sourdough discard, which is nothing more than unfed sourdough culture, into something like pancake batter or cookies, don’t do the long fermentation, and call it sourdough still.

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Where the Yeast-Sourdough Divide Really Began

It’s a common myth that sourdough purists like to perpetuate that before commercial yeast all bread was sourdough. This is simply false. While sourdough, or wild fermentation, has ancient roots, it was not the only leavener used to make bread before the Industrial Revolution. The use of yeast is also ancient.

The first people to make leavened bread, as far as we can tell, were the Egyptians, around 3000 BCE. While the yeast was wild, what modern people might call sourdough, scientists believe that it was actually a crossover from beer production, which produces yeast. To be sure, this was most likely an accidental discovery, but over time, beer production would become an important factor in how a region made their bread.

Beer-producing regions in Europe, such as what is now the UK, developed the use of barm, a byproduct of beer production, to leaven their breads, and would continue to use this method until the advent of reliable commercial yeast. Meanwhile, wine-producing regions, such as what is now France, lacking any significant beer industry, relied on naturally leavened doughs to make their breads. It is no accident that the word for the slush derived from the sourdough culture that gets added to dough to rise is “levain,” a word of French origin.

It is worth noting that the Gauls, who occupied some of what is now France in antiquity, did make incredible advancements in the controlled use of yeast in the form of barm, which they got from beer-making. Pliny the Elder, who lived between 23 CE and 79 CE, wrote that “in Gaul and Spain, where they make a drink by steeping corn [wheat] in the way that has been already described – they employ the foam which thickens upon the surface as a leaven: hence is it that the bread of those countries is lighter than that made elsewhere.”

The early Middle Ages saw a decrease in bread production and consumption, which meant that many of the techniques from antiquity almost disappeared. But by the late Middle Ages, various technological advances brought back significant bread production and eating.

The 15^th century saw the widespread use of brewer’s yeast as bread leavener in Europe. While barm and brewer’s yeast are both related to the beer-making process, they are slightly different. The latter is a bit more refined. These pre-industrial age breads were decidedly not sourdough. They were not naturally leavened, despite what some people would like to believe. People simply used the best methods at their disposal for the items they wanted to produce.

The 19^th century brought the introduction of commercial yeast, and with it the acceleration of bread production. This was a more stable and reliable version of the yeast people had already been using, and, for the first time ever, bread could be standardized from batch to batch. This made the process scalable, and paved the way for the flavorless bread that we see in supermarkets today. And for the bad reputation of yeast among die-hard sourdough purists. But it is not the yeast itself that is the problem; it is the mass-scale in which much of the bread we consume is produced that necessarily affects the final product. And that is another matter entirely.

It was also in the middle of the 19^th century, coincidentally, that sourdough began to gain popularity in the United States. This was because brewer’s yeast was hard to preserve in the long journeys West during the various gold rushes and land grabs.

So, the division we see today between yeast and sourdough, “real” and “fake,” is a modern construct. And, quite frankly, it is very reductive. Historically, bakers in all eras, whether in ancient Egypt, medieval Germany, or 21^st century Brooklyn, have used what worked. For some it was wild yeast, for others barm, for others brewer’s yeast, old dough, or commercial yeast. They were concerned with results, not with ideology or fanatical clinging to a particular method without deviation. We would do well to follow their lead.

It's the Process, Not the “Purity”

The obsession with 100% wild yeast has led many a sourdough baker to miss the forest for the trees. A sourdough with a little yeast is still a sourdough. The question we should be asking when we want to eat bread, especially what many refer to as artisan bread, which has a long history of being yeasted, should not be “is there commercial yeast in this?” It should be, instead, “was this made with care and intention?”

At the same time, it would also serve us to remember that there is no shame in buying and eating supermarket bread, whether it’s labeled as sourdough or not. It is inherently classist to suggest otherwise. Commercial yeast, now like in the 19^th century, allows for people of all means to eat the staff of life, as it were. Not everyone has the time to spend making bread or the $12 to spend on a single sourdough loaf. Not to mention that many people just don’t like the flavor of sourdough bread. Commercial yeast is not the enemy.

And if you think that the bread of the past was categorically better, have I got news for you!

If I don’t generally like wine, why did I think I would like this soup? I didn’t actually think that, but curiosity got the best of me. Oh, the things I do in the name of historical food research!

In full transparency, I initially intended to flavor the soup with strawberries, which is one of the suggestions in the recipe. But I waited so long to make the soup that the strawberries were but a sweet memory by then. Still, I was determined to make this, strawberries or not.

The recipe is from a 1904 book called German National Cookery for American Kitchens, credited to Henriette Davidis, a German cookbook author of the 19^th century. This English version was an adaptation of a much older German edition. I say adaptation because the American version is not a direct translation of the German one. Instead, it contains recipes, ingredients, and other accommodations that were fabricated, as it were, in the United States by the publisher, George Brumder, in order to appeal to German Americans. Ingredients like catfish and squash, and recipes like cornbread and apple pie do not appear in the German version. Brumder did not do it alone; he relied on the expertise of his wife, also named Henriette, and other unnamed German American women.

Henriette Davidis, for her part, was recognized as the authority on German cookery in her native land. Like some of her counterparts in the US, she was the headmistress of a household management school, where she began compiling detailed guidebooks for her students and eventually her cookbooks. She was so successful that her books were translated into other languages like Dutch, French, Danish, and, as we have here, English. Some even called her the German Fannie Farmer. She died in April of 1876.

Given the Germanness, if that’s a word, of this recipe, I felt like it could only be made with a German wine. So of course I bought Riesling … from the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.

When I first read the recipe, it seemed straightforward enough, even if I couldn’t figure out what exactly it was supposed to be. Dessert? Savory? But the moment I measured the flour to make the roux that thickens the wine I knew it wasn’t going to work as written. The recipe calls for only 2 tablespoons of butter for 2 ounces of flour, which is nowhere near enough butter. Rather than make a smooth paste, as a roux is supposed to be, the flour and the butter created a crumble that was impossible to smooth out merely by whisking once the wine was added.

While staring at the lumpy liquid in front of me, I debated stopping right then and there and calling it a failure from the get-go, but I didn’t. Instead, I resorted to a 21^st century tool that I’m certain Miss Davidis (she never married) would have approved of, and blitzed the hell out of it with an immersion blender. First crisis averted.

To flavor the soup, given my lack of strawberries, I opted for lemon peel, which is one of the suggested flavorings in the recipe. I added it with the sugar, just after blending, to make sure the zest imparted enough flavor to the soup as it thickened.

And it did thicken, but because at this point I was already in the “what the hell” stage of my historical cooking process, I decided to go ahead and add some egg yolks, as suggested in the recipe. I added 2, to be precise. Tempering them first, of course. As the concoction continued to thicken, I realized that it was just alcoholic, barely sweetened custard, or maybe a very thin pastry cream.

I kept thinking about how thick the soup was for being soup, even before adding the egg yolks. And about how strongly it tasted of wine. I mean, it was nothing but thickened wine! I didn’t like it. At all. But there was something off. Then I realized that I had forgotten to add the water. Second time, or maybe third, I lost count, that I was tempted to throw in the towel and call it a failure. But I “what the hell”ed one more time and just mixed in the water. This, of course, gave the soup a consistency more recognizable as a cream soup. Second crisis averted.

The flavor was still not good. I thought it might be because I don’t like wine very much so I asked my husband to try it. He first noticed the fruitiness, and then declared he didn’t like it. According to him, it smelled sour. Later, I realized that it reminded me of cheese fondue, just without the cheese. It was bad, actually.

And so, after many mistakes, hurdles, and doubts, I can declare with confidence that this was really, truly, a failure, but a success in proving that not all historical recipes deserve a renaissance.

Housekeeping

• In some personal news, I was recently awarded the Stirring the Pot Scholarship by Les Dames d’Escoffier New York. This scholarship is merit-based and is awarded to a culinary student interested in recipe development and cookbook writing. This will help pay for my last semester of culinary school and I’m very grateful to the Dames. But I am most excited about the mentorship that comes with it.

• Speaking of culinary school, I just wrapped up my second semester and it was intense. I did so much and learned so much in the last several months. Here is a small sampling of my favorite things I made in my classes.

I went to the location in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. This area, along with the neighboring Bensonhurst, has one of the largest concentrations of Central Asians in New York City. The store itself was so packed with people – and goods – that going down the narrow aisles felt like an Olympic full contact sport. Honestly, I love it. It’s a sign that the goods are good.

The best goods, I thought, were the ready to eat foods. I had never seen such a selection anywhere. But what really caught my eye were the plovs. How could they not? Presented in enormous wok-like vessels only hinting at what lay beneath the rice, they just screamed “eat me!”

Of course, I knew about Uzbek plov before. But it’s one thing to know about something and quite another to see it in the flesh, as it were, for the first time. That’s when I decided that, sure, I’d eat some of that one, but I’d also make my own. So, I bought meat there, and some carrots, and go to work at home on my very own Samarkand plov.

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Until relatively recently, I hadn’t heard of this trend, but, lately, I can’t scroll through Instagram without seeing another wildly ornate, pastel-colored cake, sometimes in muted colors like sage green or dusty rose (my favorite), piped with dramatic ruffles, frilly borders and little messages. “Thanks for nothing!” or “Birthday Queen.” “In My Golden Era.” “Fuck, You’re Old.” Perhaps “Be Mine,” like a conversational heart. These cakes are predominantly heart-shaped to boot and they are having a serious moment.

The cakes don’t look modern, but they don’t quite look old either. They toe the line between today and some other time we can’t quite place. They are maximalists, these “vintage cakes,” as they are called. Draped in buttercream swags, piped shell border, rosettes, and often adorned with fabric ribbons, they are unapologetically romantic and nostalgic. Sometimes, I think, they are also just the right amount of ironic. And that’s probably why they have taken off in the way they have. They aren’t just all over social media, they are all over, period. You can find them in world-class bakeries like Peggy Porschen’s in London, Edda’s Cake Designs in Miami, and even in my pastry classes, where the chef instructor decided that everyone had to make a vintage cake because it was a good way to practice piping.

Although these cakes have a timeless look, they are largely inspired by cake decorating trends of the mid 20^th century, and even as late the 1980s. When I first “discovered” cake decorating in the mid 2000s, cakes that resembled these vintage cakes were already considered old-fashioned and, consequently, out of fashion. When I paged through cake decorating manuals printed in the 1980s, I cringed at the final result while trying to learn the technique. I appreciated the skill that went into making the huge, ornate, architectural cakes of the period, I just didn’t want to make them. I was not alone. This was the time when fondant cakes, which gave a slicker, more modern look, really took off, at least in the United States, despite having been around for a long time.

The 1990s had their own influence on vintage cakes. Mostly in the color aesthetic. Not all vintage cakes are muted; some are quite bright and would have been right at home, colorwise, in a 1990s Taco Bell or Miami Subs Grill.

But those 20^th century cakes that influenced the current vintage cake trend were in themselves a revival of a much older way of decorating cakes in the 19^th century. Victorian wedding cakes were extremely detailed, with enormous amounts of piping work and sugar work. In the 1930s. Joseph Lambeth popularized a similar method of cake decorating called, unsurprisingly, the Lambeth Method. A core element of this method is overpiping, which as the name implies, involves multiple layers of icing piped on top of each other to create an intricate and ornate design. This style remained extremely popular until the 1950s before having its second most recent resurgence in the 1980s.

The vintage cake trend that we see today blends all of that cake history into something that feels new again. The main difference between historical Lambeth style and the Lambeth style of these vintage cakes is the medium. Lambeth-style cakes have traditionally been covered and piped entirely in royal icing, or, in the second half of the 20^th century, also covered in fondant and then piped with royal icing. Royal icing isn’t flavorful, but it is much more stable than buttercream, what cake designers use currently to create the cakes. Royal icing is also piped in more delicate ways, whereas vintage style cakes are chonky, to borrow a Gen Z term. They are piped with large tips, leaving behind much more deliciously sweet buttercream. This is why they don’t quite look old, like your grandmother’s wedding cake. Why, despite the very old-fashioned techniques, they look modern and of the moment.

Aesthetically, vintage trend cakes are a mashup of eras and styles, but, culturally, they make sense right now. We are living in a moment when nostalgia is king. Gen Z and Millennials are turning to the past, and not because we want to live there. We just want to reinterpret it. And obviously that is what I do as a historian, but this is a cultural phenomenon that goes beyond those of us foolish enough to interpret the past professionally. Right now, whether it’s fashion, interior design, food, and much more, we are looking for something we can remix. Vintage cakes just happen to be an aspect of that. They are comforting and over the top; they are sincere and subversive, a little bit homemade, and a little bit fancy. Add glitter dust if you want to be extra. And of course you do.

The nostalgia factor can’t be ignored, and it makes sense that this trend started, well, trending upwards, during the COVID 19 pandemic. In an increasingly uncertain world that many, including myself, feel is falling apart, people are looking for comfort in the past. A past that, through the lens of right now, felt less catastrophic. While I’m normally weary of nostalgia in food, this feels different. It feels wholesome, if escapist.

Another reason I think that these cakes have taken off is because, compared to the very elaborate fondant cakes with intricate gum paste flowers, or the impossibly sculptural carved cakes that don’t look like food, they are relatively easy to make, not to mention fun. When more is more and mistakes are easily covered or made to look like part of the design, you can let the imagination, and your piping bag, run wild. This is an intricate yet accessible cake decorating method, made even more so by the slew of tutorials, reels, and how-tos that populate the internet and social media. What was once a niche skill is now trendy and easy to learn.

These cakes are also highly customizable. It’s almost like a choose-your-own-adventure endeavor. They can be any color, they can be romantic, sarcastic, funny, snarky. Some decorators are exploring more modern approaches to vintage cakes and are combining them with other aesthetics like kawaii, cottagecore, and fairycore. The possibilities are endless.

In the end, vintage cakes are less about eating dessert and more about emotion, about the comfort of harmless excess. They are a medium for storytelling, for rebellion, for joy. They are Instagrammable but unproblematic. And maybe that’s why they’ve stuck around longer than many food trends, and why the aesthetic keeps resurfacing over the decades in slightly different iterations. The world feels uncertain, complicated, hyper-digital, violent, and Millennials and Gen Zers have experienced more than our fair share of historic once-in-a-lifetime-events, and not the nice kind. And maybe, just maybe, an over the top, frilly, kitschy heart-shaped cake with the words “Don’t Cry” written on it is just what we didn’t know we needed.

And, as for me, I’ll take a little drama with my sugar rush any time.

Almond milk has been around for far longer than most of us think, as is clear by its extensive use in Medieval households. It was used as food for the sick and invalid but also for regular people during Lenten days (or fish days), which comprised about two-thirds of the year in fourteenth-century Europe. On these days, people were not allowed to eat meat, eggs, dairy, and other land animal products. With such a dietary restriction, it is no wonder that almond milk was so popular and widely used.

I will admit that I have never been a big fan of almond milk, at least the commercially produced ones, so I’ve never been terribly interested in making my own either. However, I was planning on making another recipe that called for almond milk. I did not have any in my refrigerator, but I did have a lot of almonds, so I decided to make my own milk, including blanching the almonds, which was no fun. That said, the result was pretty incredible, and that’s coming from a non-almond milk drinker. If it wasn’t because I had plans for the milk, I would have happily drunk it right out of the jug.

I found the recipe in volume one of Take a Thousand Eggs or More, transcribed and redacted by Cindy Renfrow. The original recipe is from manuscript 4016 of the Harleian Collection in the British Library. While Take a Thousand Eggs or More does include the redacted recipe in modern format, I decided that it simply did not suit my purpose so I started from the fifteenth-century recipe and concocted my own redaction. To be fair, this was quite easy but it did give me a sense of accomplishment.

Here is the recipe in its fifteenth-century wording:

Harleian MS 4016

“111. Froyte de almondes. Take blak sugur and colde water, and caste the sugur and Þe water in a potte; and lete hem boile togidre, and salt, and skeme hem clene, and let hit kele; and Þen take Almondes, and blanch hem clene, and stampe hem in a morter al smal, and drawe hem thik ynowe thorgh a streynour with sugur water, into a faire vessell. And if hit so be Þat the mylke be not swete, take white sugur and cast thereto; And serue hit forth in maner of potage, And namly in lenton tyme.”

The first thing I did was cover Renfrow’s translation to modern English so I didn’t see it, and come up with my own. Then, I cross-referenced it against Renfrow’s and I was spot on. This wasn’t particularly difficult, it was not terribly complicated language, but it was good to see that I could do it (2025 me interjection: readers, remember this was 12 years ago). One of the things that always gets me, even though I already know this, is that despite how incomprehensible the writing looks, saying it out loud actually brings it into focus, so to speak, and makes it very clear. Try it. Now it all sounds perfectly 21st century.

The only truly confusing thing in this recipe for people who have never seen medieval writing, is the use of Þ; this letter is called “thorn” and it functions like “th.” Once you know this, or figure it out, you’re set.

Here is the modern English translation of the recipe keeping the same punctuation, grammar, and capitalization:

Harleian MS 4016

“111. Cold almond milk. Take black sugar and cold water, and cast the sugar and the water in a pot; and let them boil together, and salt, and skim them clean, and let it cool; and then take almonds, and blanch them clean, and stomp them in a mortar all small, and draw them thick now through a strainer with sugar water, into a fair vessel. And if it so be that the milk is not sweet, take white sugar and cast thereto; And serve it forth in the manner of pottage, And namely in lenten time.”

Much better!

As with any historical recipe, translating it is only the beginning, and there are still steps that need to be completed, and questions to be answered, before the execution of the recipe.

When I first looked at this recipe, and before I looked at Renfrow’s redaction, I had a few questions, mainly about the ingredients. For example, the recipe calls for black sugar. What is black sugar? Was their black sugar more like modern raw sugar or was their black sugar more like pilon (sugar loaf)? I did know for certain that it was NOT the brown sugar, light or dark, that is commonly available in the United States. That brown sugar is just processed sugar with molasses added back to it. I do know someone who is a sugar expert, I wish I had been able to use her help here. Another thing to consider was how dark was this sugar, really, when almond milk was often used in blancmange, which was white? I checked another almond milk recipe in a different manuscript, Harleian 279, and it all also called for black sugar. In Spanish, we call brown sugar, the unrefined type, “azucar prieta,” and some times “azucar negra,” which means “black sugar.” Of course, this sounds like a long process on paper, or online, but it was actually only a matter of a couple of minutes in mind. I made the decision to use turbinado sugar, which is a golden raw cane sugar. I could have gone with the darker muscovado but I did not have any, and there was still the issue of the final color of the milk. I’m OK with my decision.

I briefly considered grinding the almonds in a mortar but quickly threw out that idea. I felt that, in this case, the final product would not be affected by whether I ground the almonds by hand or in a blender. So I went with the blender, which I am sure the medievals would have done if they had had one. Yes, that is conjecture.

Here is the final recipe, adapted for the modern kitchen:

Almond Milk

1 cup of almonds

3 cups of water

1/4 cup turbinado sugar

Pinch of salt

To blanch the almonds, put them in a bowl and cover them with boiling water. Let them sit for 10 minutes. Drain the almonds and immediately rinse them with cold running water. Remove the skins by gently squeezing each almond. Alternatively, you may purchase already blanched almonds and just soak them in boiling water to soften them up.

Place the 3 cups of water, sugar, and salt in a small pot over medium heat. Heat until the sugar dissolves. Place the almonds and the sugar water in a blender and let it cool until it is safe to blend them, approximately 10 minutes. Blend until the milk looks smooth. It will be gritty if tasted. This may take 3 to 5 minutes, depending on your blender.

Strain the mixture through a nut milk bag or cheesecloth over a strainer until there is no longer a trickle. Carefully squeeze the bag or the bundled cheesecloth, until most of the remaining liquid has been drained.

Yields just under 3 cups of strained milk

The final result was a really good, thick milk that resembles whole milk in consistency and I did not feel it needed any more sugar, even to be drunk as milk rather than used in another recipe. It is entirely possible, however, that less sugar may have been used in period, but the fact that the recipe says to add more sugar if the milk is not sweet, tells me it’s OK to go ahead and make it sweeter from the beginning.

I thought about not blanching the almonds since they would be strained out anyway, but after seeing the color of the water in which the almonds were blanched, I’m glad that I did. This is only so because I needed the milk to be pretty light in color for the dish that it was made to go into, but they do not need to be blanched if it’s just for drinking and you don’t mind a bit of a brownish tint.

I said that the reason I decided to redact the recipe my way, instead of using Renfrow’s redaction/modernization, was that hers did not suit my purpose. Hers uses less water, making it thicker and much more soup-like, which is OK, just not what I needed.

I am rather pleased with this recipe, and while I probably won’t go through the trouble of blanching the almonds again (I’ll buy blanched or forego blanching altogether), I will definitely use it again if I ever need almond milk.

My dive into Knox Gelatine’s strange career came about when I bought a vintage Tupperware gelatin mold because I wanted to try my hand at, well, gelatin molds. Naturally, I had to also acquire vintage recipes, which led to the purchase of a lot (as in a group, but also many) of recipe booklets from the first half of the 20^th century. Many of them were JELL-O brand and many others were Knox.

I was fascinated with the many ways that Knox promoted itself through the decades so the actual making of the molded gelatin took a back seat. But, after publishing that piece, I couldn’t just close the gelatin chapter without going back to what started it all. I had to make molded gelatin.

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Readers, this post is picture-heavy and thus too long for email. To read it in its entirety, you may have to go to the website or the Substack app.

Thoughts of mid-20^th century dinner parties stir up images – and sometimes memories – of vile-looking dishes, at least to our modern sensibilities, of lettuce, or worse, fish, encapsulated in clear gelatin concoctions. Jellied hamburger loaves. Leftover salad with celery, cheese, and stuffed olives that stare like bloodshot eyes straight into your soul through the clear green lens of lime gelatin. These and other similar monstrosities are often brought up as examples of how terrible food used to be. And it is perhaps because of dishes like these that the popularity of gelatin has fallen in the US, but these curiosities are not even remotely the most interesting parts of the history of gelatin in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Most of these dishes we have come to feel so much disdain for were made with JELL-O, a flavored and sweetened gelatin powder. But Knox, the brand that makes unflavored gelatin that also partook in the aspics and jelly salads, has a much more interesting history. And yet, we rarely hear about it.

Humans have used gelatin for hundreds of years at least. Aspics, that is, savory jellies, of all sorts appear in cooking-related sources as far back as the 10^th century CE. That is the consensus, anyway, that gelatin’s use as we know it to thicken liquids and encase other foods dates to this time and first appeared in Kitab al-Tabikh, or The Book of Dishes, hailing from Baghdad. It now appears in a few translations, the most popular being A Baghdad Cookery Book by Charles Perry. In Kitab al-Tabikh, the gelatin is made by boiling fish bones and fish heads.

But there is an even older cooking manuscript that mentions gelatin preparation. Apicius de re Coquinaria, compiled in the 5^th century CE or before, contains a recipe called “salacattabia Apiciana,” or Apician jelly, numbered 126. It is a molded mélange of ingredients like chicken, calf sweetbreads, cheese, vegetables and more, flooded with jellied broth. The mold was then buried in snow to solidify. The whole thing was unmolded, sprinkled with a dressing, and served. This is an aspic, without a doubt. By the 19^th century, jellies, aspics, and other gelatin concoctions were extremely popular with the wealthy. It is the Victorian era, and not the mid-20^th century that gives us the most spectacular molded gelatin creations.

But obtaining this gelatin was nasty work. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, gelatin was obtained by boiling cow and pig hooves for hours. The resulting stock was passed through a cloth bag to strain it, boiled once more, and finally allowed to cool and solidify. It was a smelly and unpleasant process. In 1681, Denis Papin improved this process through the development of a new method that extracted gelatin from bones rather than hooves. In 1812 Jean Pierre Joseph d'Arcet improved the process once again by introducing the use of hydrochloric acid combined with steam. Still, making gelatin wasn’t a pleasant experience at home, where the older ways were still the norm.

Then Knox came along. Charles Knox developed granulated gelatin, the story goes, after years of watching his wife go through the tedious and unsavory process of making gelatin. At first, Knox hired peddlers to teach women how to use his gelatin and, of course, to sell it. This was in 1894, and in 1896 Rose Knox, the wife, going by Rose Markward, published a booklet called Dainty Desserts for Dainty People with recipes on how to use the gelatin. Prior to being sold in granules, Knox’s gelatin was sold in shredded form from 1891 through 1893.

Riding the coattails of Knox, Pearl B. Wait, a former cough syrup manufacturer, developed JELL-O in 1897, which they sold to Orator Francis Woodward in 1899. It wasn’t initially popular, but it would later become popular enough to worry Knox.

The difference between Knox Gelatine and JELL-O was, and still is, that Knox was just gelatin while JELL-O was flavored and mostly sugar. This fact would become the main point of differentiation between the two, and what the Knox company uses until now to differentiate themselves. Knox condemned JELL-O as unhealthy and their own product as the epitome of health. In this pursuit lies the strange history of Knox Gelatine as baby food, health aid, weight loss supplement, and much more – a pursuit that remains active to this day.

Initially, the ads for Knox products emphasized the pureness of the gelatin and the ease of use. In Dainty Desserts for Dainty People, for example, they claim that Knox’s Sparkling Calves Foot Gelatine, “the purest made,” was recognized as “the Standard by all users of pure food.” They go on to explain that “you have, no doubt, noticed, while pouring the hot water on some gelatines, a sickening odor which will arise from it (this never will happen in pure gelatines), and shows that the stock is not pure, so is unfit for food.” Anyone who has used granulated unflavored gelatin today, a niche that Knox effectively monopolizes, will no doubt, to borrow, Knox’s own words, have noticed that sickening smell, casting the shadow of doubt over Knox’s claims.

The cultural context of when Knox came onto the scene explains their emphasis on the pure food rhetoric. The end of the 19^th century was the height of the pure food movement, a reaction to the increasing physical and metaphorical separation between producers of food and consumers of foods. Railways, refrigerated cars, industrialization, the rise of large national corporations, and other changes during the century meant that people began to grow suspicious of food grown by anonymous producers and packed by anonymous packers far from where consumers lived. To be sure, fears over the adulteration of food are as old as humanity itself, but this period was a turning point.

The first mass calling for government regulation of food and drugs began in the 1880s, and, unsurprisingly, women were at the core of the movement. This was especially the case when it came to drugs and alcohol, but food as well. The government didn’t really respond until thirteen children died in 1901 from a tainted diphtheria vaccine. Congress passed the Biologics Control Act in 1902, and shortly after allocated money for the research of preservatives in food and their impact on those who consumed it. All of this led to the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Knox Gelatine, whose main target audience was women – largely responsible for both feeding and for the well-being of their families – leaned heavily into these calls for pureness to promote their product. As JELL-O’s popularity grew, Knox leaned more and more into the health and medicine rhetoric, as they positioned themselves as the opposite of JELL-O. This change began under the oversight of a woman, Rose Knox, who ran Knox Gelatine Factory from 1908 when her husband died.

While an early 20^th century advertisement shows a baby thinking “just wait till I get a little bigger” while staring at a molded jelly, the message quickly changed.

One of the earliest approaches to Knox Gelatine as more than dessert or treats made with a pure product was to promote the product as a baby food and baby health aid. A 1924 ad claimed that Knox Gelatine could help babies digest cow’s milk better. Knox Gelatine, according to the ad, helped babies’ stomachs break down the milk curds for better digestion, saving them from malnourishment. Older children could benefit too; parents could get sneaky and disguise vegetables in gelatin.

By the 1930s, the whole family could benefit from Knox Gelatine’s purported health properties. Fatigued or tired? A “scientific discovery” showed drinking Knox could help. Convalescing? Knox was there for you! Need stronger nails? You guessed it, Knox! Peptic ulcer? Knox gelatin was the therapy.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Knox advertised in nursing journals promoting the gelatin to the medical community as an aid for all sorts of ailments. They particularly promoted it for special diets like those low in calories, high on protein, or bland diets. Patients needing to supplement their protein intake could mix Knox Gelatine into water, juice, or milk for a digestible boost of protein. If patients were on a low sodium diet, well, Knox Gelatine was low on sodium. Geriatric patients could benefit from Knox Gelatine’s “ease of digestion, and its easiness on dentures.” If hemoglobin formation was the concern, “Knox Gelatine contains important glycine and proline necessary” for the task. As far as Knox was concerned, their gelatin could be used for just about anything health-related. But you should never, under any circumstance, confuse it with “ready-flavored gelatine dessert powders which contain about 7/8 sugar and only about 1/8 gelatine.”

Despite their attempt to target healthcare providers directly through advertising in these journals, there was one type of diet for which Knox went straight to the end user, and their longtime target customers: women. The diet was dieting itself, or reducing, as it was commonly called at the time. Knox promised women that their product would not just help them lose weight and keep it off, but that it would make the process a pleasure. In the 1939 booklet “Be Fit Not Fat,” a woman in a big hat, white gloves, and extraordinarily high heels stands on a scale while looking at the number in horror. We, the reader, can see that she is rather slim, and her puppy is also standing partially on the scale, increasing the offensive number.

This booklet “contains a carefully selected list of delectable desserts and salad recipes especially designed to make dieting a pleasure for weight-watchers.” The idea was to lighten up these courses, to substitute them with options with fewer calories, so women could satisfy their sweet tooth without the “silhouette-wrecking” effects adding more calories to their diet might cause. By the 1950s, these substitutions had morphed into an entire dieting plan, dictating what to have for every meal of the day.

The “Eat-And-Reduce” plan, as Knox called it, according to them, helped “thousands of overweight people to gain a slimmer, more youthful, pleasing figure.” The argument for gelatin’s role in the success of the diet was that, since the gelatin was all protein and no extra calories, it could make people feel less hungry while eating less. Each day had five meals: breakfast, mid-morning quick-up, lunch, mid-afternoon quick-up, and dinner. For each meal, along with other foods, dieters were to drink Knox Gelatine in either juice, bouillon, or water, and more gelatin was cooked into various dishes. Depending on the day, the total number of calories was between 1235 and 1374 with no differentiation for age, height, activity level, or anything else.

Not all the health claims that Knox has made during its strange and ever-adapting career are necessarily wrong, but it is painfully obvious that every single one was an attempt to differentiate themselves from the ever-popular JELL-O. Knox chose to go the health route in marketing their gelatin in direct opposition to JELL-O, whose approach was entirely based on the pleasure and “joys” of eating dessert with all the sugar and all the calories; concern for diets, ulcers, or fingernails not welcomed. Even today, Knox positions itself in the same way, despite the fundamentally different natures of the products.

“Knox Unflavored Gelatine is as timely as ever,” their website says, “as a low-calorie, pure protein food, it fits perfectly into modern lifestyles as an essential ingredient for light, healthful cooking.” You can even use it as “Golden Scrubbing Grains” for your face for all skin types. Just mix equal parts by volume cornmeal and Knox Gelatine, dampen your face, scrub with the mixture, and rinse.

When I left you in the February 1^st post, I had made the Huckleberry Cake from The White House Cook Book by Fanny Lemira Gillette and Hugo Ziemann. Or attempted to make it, anyway. You can read more about that in that post, but the very short recap is that it had too much sugar, the amount of flour was an unknown – I initially guessed 2 cups – and the cake fell apart when I tried to remove it from the pan.

For the second test, I cut the sugar in half because I was convinced that was the biggest problem with Gillette’s recipe, aside from not stating the amount of flour. I was right. The cake stayed together and was adequately sweet. The taste was good, and, of course, we ate it. But it still needed one more round of testing, mostly because I felt it needed a bit of salt. I know the original recipe doesn’t call for salt, but at this point I was past having any faith in the original recipe.

I also decided to go ahead and use the huckleberries in this test, since I was fairly certain the cake would work, even if it wasn’t the final iteration. The recipe calls for one quart of huckleberries, which is a lot of huckleberries. I wanted to be conservative with my expensive huckleberries and used 1½ cups. Any more than that is entirely too much for this amount of batter. It would be huckleberries with a bit of cake in between them. It would also be a soggy mess.

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The cookbook was first published in 1887 by Fanny Lemira Gillette, and, despite its name and the dedication to the First Ladies, no First Lady, past or current at the time of the book’s publishing, was involved in the creation of the book. In fact, there is nothing in the book that relates to the White House other than some photos of various first Ladies. In modern terms, the title of the book is nothing more than clickbait. Some things are older than we think.

In later editions, Hugo Ziemann, the steward of the White House, was a contributor. But, again, nothing much relating to the White House appears in those editions either aside from some banquet menus and what amounts to two pages on the management of state dinners at the presidential home. Given that the cookbook was marketed as a household manual and guide to practical housekeeping, it’s difficult to understand how the etiquette of White House receptions would have been helpful to the women who bought it.

As a steward, Ziemann would not have necessarily had any in-depth knowledge of White House cookery. His job involved greeting guests and anyone arriving to see the president between 1880 and 1891. This is likely why in a cookbook his contribution was not in recipes or actual meals served but with etiquette and management of things like seating arrangements and order of service.

Aside from his gig at the White House, Ziemann seems to have had a long resume of prestigious appointments, including, according to the Publisher’s Preface, caterer to “that Prince Napoleon.” This refers to Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandson Napoleon Eugene Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, also known as the Prince Imperial. Why have just one or two names when you can have five?

Gillette, for her part, was a prolific cookbook author who found success later in life. She was 60 years old at the publication of the first edition of The White House Cook Book. Riding the wave of the success of this book, she went on to publish several more cookbooks before her death at the age of 98.

The cookbook itself became very popular, despite the misleading title. By the beginning of the 20^th century, it had become a popular gift to give newlywed women. It went on to have several more editions and updates, with the latest one being in 1996. This edition was released in time for the presidential election that year. This time, the book’s blurb claimed to actually be a product of the White House. Furthermore, it made it sound like it had originally been a White House creation. This edition was, according to the back cover, ‘the most tasteful text to come out of the White House in the last 100 years.” And yet, they demonized the original edition of the book for being full of cream, eggs, salt, taking too long to cook, etc. This was a product of the time, the blurb acknowledges, a time when “obesity was considered a sign of good living.”

The book’s shtick, predictably, was recipes updated to be quick, low-fat, no-fat, and “healthier.” This, of course, was also a product of the time. The 1990s was ripe with fat-hating diet rhetoric that has been proven to be false – fat isn’t inherently bad – and damaging in the long term. There even was a “War on Fat” campaign that aimed to get Americans to reduce fat consumption for healthier living. What it did was create an increase in carbs and sugar consumption that fueled the obesity epidemic. We are, collectively, still dealing with the consequences.

Unlike previous editions of the book, the 1996 one did include recipes by White House occupants. Hilary Clinton and Barbara Bush contributed recipes. Clinton’s recipe was a chocolate chip cookie and Bush’s scotch shortbread. Rather than being integrated into the book’s sections for various courses and types of foods, the recipes by the first ladies lead, appearing just after the introduction. The remaining recipes are a selection from the ones in the Gillette-Ziemann edition. They all include nutritional information and are formatted in the style of modern recipes.

Going back to the original book, there are many that I would love to try, but given that today is the 2^nd anniversary of this publication, cake seemed like a good idea, following last year’s trend. Despite the current state of the world, I choose to celebrate the things that feel like accomplishments to me, and two years of showing up is definitely an accomplishment.

Aside from wanting a celebratory cake, I’ve also been wanting to try huckleberries so when I saw a relatively straightforward recipe for huckleberry cake in there, I decided that’s what I was going to make. My current culinary school schedule is bonkers so straightforward is just about all I can manage.

But “straightforward” was a lie. As if to mock me and my efforts to celebrate, the recipe managed to fool me until I was literally starting to mix it. I had softened butter in the mixing bowl, and what seemed like an ungodly amount of sugar. The sugar to butter ratio was so off that, when creaming in a stand mixer, the entire glob of sugar and butter formed a football-shaped mass that just stuck to one side of the paddle. Normally, the paddle spreads the mixture on the sides of the bowl as it creams.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem. The problem, readers, was the flour. I had read the recipe a dozen times, and each time I failed to see that, despite flour being mentioned twice, there was no amount given.

In that moment, I decided that rather than waste my very expensive huckleberries – I had to order them from Washington – I was going to test the cake first to see if it even worked. So, I added two cups of flour to the cake and put it in the oven. An hour later, it was time to take it out. And here the misfortunes continued.

Despite greasing an already nonstick pan, the cake was stuck at the bottom. So, when it came time to remove it from the pan, it just fell apart. And, to my surprise, it was ever so slightly underdone in the center, despite the cake tester coming out clean. I did try some pieces and, as predicted, it was cloyingly sweet. Really, too sweet, even for me, who likes sweet to be really sweet. It is, of course, entirely possible that I am using finer sugar than Gillette was, thus my two cups held more weight of sugar than hers. A case for weighing ingredients if there ever was one, but that is a whole other issue.

Because I didn’t know how much flour Gillette intended to use – it only says to mix the huckleberries with some flour, and that the baking powder should be rubbed with the flour – I had no way of knowing what type of cake this was. I looked at other cake recipes in the book and the omission of flour here was certainly a mistake, but there were no other cakes similar to this one.

This is the point in the recreation and modernizing of historical recipes when you have to make the decision of keeping the integrity of the original recipe, as flawed as this one was, or rework it, adjust ingredients, and make it into a recipe that works and maintains the spirit of the original even if they are not exactly the same (something the writers and editors of the 1996 edition should have considered!). This process of making historical recipes usually isn’t a big problem, except in baked goods. Baked goods will get you.

Even then, I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of times recipes have simply, entirely, and irrevocably flopped, even on the first attempt, like this one. In recent memory, only one comes to mind. It wasn’t a baked good, but it was a dessert. Right after I made Junket with Strawberries, which did not flop at all, I decided to make another junket dessert with condensed milk. That one did not fare well.

I followed a recipe from 1913 that said condensed milk was fine to use for junket. So, I made it. But it didn’t set. Not even slightly. Turns out, that the junket tablets from 1913 were made with animal rennet and the modern tablets are made with vegetable rennet. I would have known modern tablets would not have worked with condensed milk if only I had read the entire junket tablet box. It clearly says that it will not with condensed milk. That failure was entirely on me.

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Sometimes the difference between a historical recipe that worked then and doesn’t work now is that ingredients, despite having the same name, change. This is completely out of my control, or your control, and you often don’t know until you have a failure on your hands. There are many reasons why historical recipes may not work today, and you can’t always predict it.

I didn’t share that junket failure on my website (I wasn’t writing on Substack then), but I did share it on Instagram. This time, I hesitated about sharing this cake failure, but, in the end, I decided to do it. Mostly because it is a testament to the hard work that goes into recipe development, whether you are starting from scratch or from historical recipes. This failure also speaks to the fact that for every great recipe you see online, there may be countless attempts that ended in less than desirable products, if not entirely in failure.

I am not trying to cultivate an image of perfection. I wouldn’t trust anyone who actively sought to make themselves seem perfect at what they do. What I am trying to cultivate is an image of perseverance, grit, and always learning. These, to me, are some of the most important qualities a person can have, both in and out the kitchen.

I will keep working on this recipe, but for now, here you have my failures. My failure to notice a missing ingredient. My failure to travel back in time and peep in Fanny Gillette’s kitchen and see if she really used two cups of sugar, how much flour she used, or if she made this recipe at all.

In my years studying food history and historical foodways, I have noticed that the home aspect of food looms large. By this, I mean that places like restaurants are largely left out. That is not to say there isn’t excellent work done on restaurants, especially historically focused work, but the home life, the familial, the personal, is much more prevalent.

Writings about restaurants, on the other hand, are largely critique, leaving the personal out. I have never been especially interested in reviews of restaurants because they seem so sterile. Give me the human element, please! And, of course, that element exists in restaurants. They are, after all, conceived and run by humans, and humans patronize them. They are also markers and makers of culture, of trends, and taste. They are part of our foodways, and have become an even larger part of our meal landscape in recent years.

Recently, I’ve been keeping an eye on restaurant news and articles that I feel deeply engage with the core tenets of what we define as foodways. That is, articles that delve into the cultural and social aspects of restaurants, and that, in some way, give us a glimpse into the human experience.

I’m sharing some of those articles with you here, along with an in-depth summary, and sometimes an analysis of them or my thoughts. Most of them are from the New York Times and pay-walled, but not all. The links are gift links, so if you are reading this before January 27th, 2025, you should see the entire article in each link. And if you are reading it after, my synopses are pretty in-depth so you’ll get the idea. I’ve listed them in chronological order.

- "How Janet Yellen Became an Unlikely Culinary Diplomat." Alan Rappeport, New York Times, July 13, 2024

In this article, Rappeport explains how Janet Yellen, the United States Secretary of the Treasury, has come under the watchful eye of Americans and foreigners alike, who have been keeping track of her culinary and dining escapades. People are fascinated and intrigued.

Yellen’s job comes with a fair amount of travel, which she has taken as an opportunity to experience the food and drinks of the countries – and cities – she must visit for work. Pastries with the Irish finance minister, a taqueria in Mexico City, working dinners with Chinese officials, pizza the Italian way in Italy, beers at a Chinese brewery that uses American hops. While she is certainly not the only politician who engages in meetings like this, she asserts that part of the fascination is that she does so publicly, and people are just not used to seeing politicians eating in public.

Ms. Yellen initially says that “it’s not like it’s a scheme to conduct some sort of diplomacy,” but, whether she realizes it or not, she joins a tradition that has existed as long as politics has. Humans have long combined eating and politics, policy-making, and business dealing to make them more palatable, pun absolutely intended. People are simply more at ease and relaxed when they are eating. A dinner table somehow feels less hostile than a board room, or a government building. And Yellen knows this for certain, despite her statement that it is not intentional. She explains that “dining with local officials” and talking to local people “helps inform her thinking as a policymaker.” She adds that by dining with people that don’t necessarily agree with you on politics “you can establish a friendlier relationship than you can sitting at a conference table.” Yellen is fully aware of the power of sharing a meal and the relationship between food and diplomacy, and she leverages it expertly.

Her approach to food, dining, and diplomacy shows that restaurants can be places of political importance, of soft power, albeit in a slightly tangential way, more often than we think. Yellen is just what we see, the tip of the proverbial iceberg. History is full of deals, treaties, and accords concocted over a meal and there is no reason to believe this will change anytime soon.

- “How self-service tech is saving jobs in California’s $20 minimum wage era.” Brandon Barton, Nation’s Restaurant News, August 19, 2024

This article explains that is happening in California’s fast-food industry after the $20 minimum wage bill passed in early 2024.

Leading up to the passing of the bill, people worried that raising the minimum wage would lead to mass layoffs, reduced working hours, and price hikes to offset the labor cost. However, what actually happened was quite different. Many restaurants shifted to digital order-taking without laying off employees. They installed self-serve ordering kiosks, which freed up employees to concentrate on other tasks like sanitation, improved food quality, and improved guest experience after digital ordering.

Surprisingly, these kiosks have improved sales, creating more revenue without price increases. Check sizes are 20% bigger on average. The rationale, they think, is that guests are freer to explore the menu and customize their order. Guests also responded better to upsales when they ordered through the kiosks. Kiosks also reduced wait time, which means the restaurant could serve most customers in less time.

The big takeaway is that with the right technology, increasing the minimum wage does not have to mean job losses or price hikes. California’s shift, although still in the early stages, could serve as a blueprint for similar legislation in the rest of the country.

- "What’s on the menu? These Restaurants Aren’t Telling." Rachel Sugar, New York Times, October 10, 2024

This article covers a recent trend in relatively prominent restaurants to not advertise their menu, not have it online, and sometimes not even post photos of the food on their social media channels. The management of these restaurants, which include Warlord in Chicago, Zizou in Los Angeles, Frog Club in New York City, and Saigon Babylon in Cambridge, MA, claim that they are not gatekeeping but are instead trying to put some mystery back into dining. In today’s world, you can find the menu for most restaurants online, which leaves little to the imagination. These establishments claim to be rolling things back to pre-internet times, trying to “revive a long-lost spirit” of adventure. They explain they don’t want people gaming their visit but “surrender to the pleasure of it.”

Some people agree with this approach, they want a bit of mystery. But others, understandably, find it frustrating, especially when they are trying to find if a restaurant has vegan options, or gluten-free options, etc. Others, like restaurant critics, are frustrated because they feel these owners or managers are just “a bunch of petulant children rebelling against the norm.”

There are two more reasons why some restaurants, especially smaller ones, don’t want to post their menu online or provide much information at all. One is logistics, even more so if they are seasonal or the menu changes often; there is just more work to be done in updating online menus. And the other is that they don’t want to set up the scene ahead of time and have people anticipating an experience they can’t always match. Nevertheless, most of these restaurants will give you the menu ahead of time if you ask.

I have to side with the people who oppose this trend for a variety of reasons, including most of the ones given in the article itself. While there is no obligation for restaurants to advertise their menu off premise, it has, in fact, become the norm, and it has been for the better for a large percentage of the population. Just because the dining experience used to be different, doesn’t mean that the dining experience used to be better. Nostalgia can distort the past, as I’ve previously argued. Just like with everything else, things change and we must adapt. This is especially important given the weight that menus have in marketing eating establishments.

The practices of these restaurants go counter to what we know, or think, works in regards to menus and marketing. And yet, these places seem to be doing well, and clearly the mystery works. The Frog Club didn’t even allow photos to be taken inside the restaurant until recently. Their whole approach was secrecy and it drew people in. This brings into question whether menus are really as powerful a tool for marketing restaurants as we’ve been claiming they are. Maybe restaurants have become so habitual, so pedestrian, that diners crave something else. Omakase and chef’s tasting menus, where guests pay hundreds of dollars for a meal that is a complete mystery until it’s on the table, certainly embody that yearning.

- “Why So Many Chefs Don’t Want Restaurants Anymore.” Frank Bruni. New York Times, October 10, 2024.

In this article, Bruni discusses how former restaurant chefs/owners have moved away from the kitchen and gone into different lines of work that still use their skills and knowledge. One of the chefs discussed in the article, Seamus Mullen, formerly of Boqueria and Suba, both in Manhattan, moved to Southern California and has become a rancher. He also does some consulting, among other food-related work, just not in a restaurant kitchen. Other chefs have left restaurants to do other work, with private chef being a popular option.

But many other chefs made their careers entirely outside of restaurant kitchens. Samin Nosrat, and Alison Roman, for example, have made their careers based on creating recipes for the public and writing cookbooks. Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a modern classic. Although she has worked in restaurant kitchens, it was in small, supporting positions and not very long.

Many of the chefs cite mental health and work-life balance as the reason for leaving, or never going into, restaurant kitchens. Not to mention that they can make far more money doing far less back-breaking, emotionally taxing work doing other things. Stephen Starr, for example, says he can make between $15,000 and $20,000 to develop 8 to 12 recipes for a restaurant and teach the cooks how to make it. This, he says, is “a month or two of part-time work.” Other chefs do pop-ups and special events, which allow them to interact with their guests in much more intimate ways than they could in a restaurant. Many of the chefs find that much more fulfilling.

The article mentions a variety of other roles these chefs have gone on to perform outside of restaurant kitchens, showing the range of possibilities that exist in the industry for formally trained chefs.

Given my own inclinations and career goals, I found this article encouraging, and enlightening. I think it showcases well the different types of jobs someone can do with culinary training.

The mental health aspect of the story reminded me of an interview with Heston Blumenthal I watched recently. Blumenthal was one of the molecular gastronomy giants, and owner/chef of The Fat Duck, a three-Michelin star restaurant in England. According to him, he used to work something like 100 hours a week. It was brutal work. What’s worse, it turns out that Blumenthal was suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and ADHD, which were exacerbated by his extreme work schedule. He became suicidal and had to be committed/sanctioned into a mental institution against his will. He has said that he fears watching the popular show The Bear because it might trigger a bipolar disorder.

- "Hate Noisy Restaurants? Stick This in Your Ear." Pete Wells, New York Times, October 18, 2024

In this article, Pete Wells, former restaurant critic for The New York Times, walks readers through how to activate certain accessibility features on AirPods that make it easier to hear your companions in a noisy restaurant.

In order to test whether wearing earbuds helps hear and be heard in “hellishly loud restaurants,” Wells booked a table, asking for the loudest spot, at some of the loudest restaurants in New York City. These restaurants, Wells explains, are the ones he usually avoids. This experiment came on the heels of Apple’s announcement that the AirPods Pro 2 would serve as over-the-counter hearings aids for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. After several tests, Wells concluded that yes, they do help, and instructs readers on how to access this feature.

The bigger picture, however, is that restaurants have become unbearably loud, negatively affecting the dining experience. He claims that diners understand that they have a shared interest in keeping their volume “conversation-friendly,” but that, ultimately, they want to be heard and so they speak louder and louder. “Self-interest,” he says, “wins out over the common good.”

This is not the first article I’ve read that discusses the noise levels in restaurants. That we have to resort to hearing aid-like devices just to be able to hear our dining companions is an indictment of the unbearable level of noise so many restaurants have reached. And it is not just diners speaking loudly, it is also the noise that comes with running a restaurant, the clanking of utensils on plate, and, worst of all, the loud music that many restaurants insist on playing. All of this is worsened by the fact that, unlike restaurants of the past, many modern restaurants lack soft furnishings that muffle or absorb sound.

A 2018 article from Vox, titled “Why Restaurants Became So Loud, and How to Fight Back,” claims that, according to everyone they spoke to, a lot of this noise is intentional. Restaurant owners want to create buzz and vibrancy, which they equate with loud music and noise. This phenomenon began in the 1990s and has reached shocking levels.

I think there has to be some balance, and not just for the sake of the guests. While diners might be inconvenienced for an hour or two while they eat their meal, restaurant employees have to work in these excessively noisy environment for hours and days, risking serious hearing damage. AirPods are simply not the answer.

- "The New Era of West African Fine Dining." Ligaya Mishan, New York Times, November 11, 2024

In this article Mishan explores the emergence of West African fine dining in Europe and the United States, and the chefs that are pioneering the movement.

While West African restaurants have been around for a long time, they were almost always low-profile establishments by immigrants for immigrants. To be sure, some non-West Africans were drawn to those restaurants, but they were drawn largely by the thrill of cheap, exotic eats.

But in recent years, West African - or of West African descent - chefs in Paris, London, New York, and New Orleans, among other places, have taken West African cuisines (there isn’t a single unified cuisine in the region) out of the cheap, obscure places, and straight into the fine dining scene. Some of the restaurants are a la carte, and others offer only tasting menus with prices and service that match any fine dining Michelin star restaurant you might have heard about. These chefs are “interrogating what’s considered acceptable as food in different contexts,” and the idea they are pushing back against is that West African food doesn’t belong in fine dining, as many of them were told when they were starting out. Serigne Mbaye, a classically trained chef and owner of Dakar in New Orleans says that “fine dining is not a cuisine, it’s simply a concept.”

This article does an excellent job at bringing this emergence of West African cuisine into the fine dining world to a wider audience that might have only known of one of these restaurants. Independently, you could think that it’s just one chef doing this or that, but, when looked at as a whole, it is clear that the scene is shifting, and not just for the chefs but or diners too, who are after all, keeping the restaurants open.

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I was on Reddit one day, as I often am, when an interesting question popped up on my home feed. On the r/AskFoodHistorians subreddit, someone posted whether anyone knew anything about Auguste Escoffier’s truffled turkey. More precisely, they wanted to know if it was something that was commonly eaten, especially since Escoffier’s recipe, according to the poster, calls for 2 pounds of truffles. They had watched the 2023 film The Taste of Things, set in 1889 with Juliette Binoche (how many French food movies can she be in?!), where one of the characters (Dodin) says “I agree, Grimaud, all conversation must cease when a truffled turkey appears. But this is merely a veal loin with braised lettuce.”

What kind of culinary historian and cookbook enthusiast – not to mention chef-in-training – would I be if I didn’t keep a copy of Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire (1903) handy? The English translation by M. F. K. Fisher, anyway. I yanked the doorstop of a tome out of the shelf and looked up this truffled turkey. It was, indeed, there. It is recipe 3914, “Dindonneau Truffé,” or truffled young turkey. And while it doesn’t call for 2 pounds of truffles, it does call for 800g, a whopping 1 pound and 9 ounces, give or take. It also calls for 250g – 9 ounces – of raw foie gras.

And it had to be a turkey, or at least not a pheasant, as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin warns in The Physiology of Taste (1825), also translated by M.F.K. Fisher. “A pheasant with truffles,” he says, is not good as one would be apt to think it. The bird is too dry to actuate the tubercle [the truffle], and the scent of the one and the perfume of the other when united neutralize each other – or rather do not suit.” What a waste of your truffles! And your pheasant.

Escoffier disagrees, of course, and offers readers multiple recipes for pheasant with truffles.

Despite his disdain for truffled pheasant, Brillat-Savarin did hold truffles themselves in very high esteem. And, like many modern people, he believed them to be an aphrodisiac across the gender divide. He described them as awakening “erotic and gourmand ideas both in the sex dressed in petticoats and in the bearded portion of humanity.” He was so convinced that truffles’ main attraction was that they excited the senses and arose passions that he gathered a group of male acquaintances into what he calls “a tribunal, a senate, a sanhedrin, an areopagus,” to ponder the statement “the truffle is a positive aphrodisiac, and under certain circumstances makes women kinder, and men more amiable.”

Aside from his rhetoric on sex and senses, Brillat-Savarin also gives us a small glimpse into the contemporary consumption of truffles. He says that around 1780 truffles were very rare in France, and found mostly in small quantities in the kitchens of the Hotel des Americans and the Hotel de Province. “Dindon truffé,” truffled turkey, he explains, “was a luxury only seen at the tables of great nobles and of kept women.” But, by 1825, when he wrote The Physiology of Taste, “the glory of the truffle” was “at its apogee.” He goes on to say “let no one ever confess that he dined where truffles were not.” Truffles had become common, at least in the upper echelons of society, in ways that are foreign to us today, when even the very rich don’t eat truffles as a matter of course.

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By the 1920s the lore of the truffle had become so strong that, according to an article published in 1923 by Curtis Gates Lloyd, an American mycologist (truffles are fungi), “many people, particularly Americans and the English” seemed to think that they were “eaten by the French as we [Americans] eat potatoes.” He explains that no, they were not eaten like potatoes, but that, in fact, they were used as flavorings. Lloyd adds that their high cost meant they were out of the reach of ordinary people. Black truffles, he says “in normal conditions before the war [WWI],” were sold in Paris for 10 to 20 francs per kilogram, or $1-$2 per pound. White truffles, on the other hand, were sold at the time of writing for 100 to 400 lires per kilogram, or about $5 to $25 a pound. “At these prices,” he says, “it is needless to say that truffles are not used as food, but as flavoring.” In the span of 100 years, truffles went from the abundance of Brillat-Savarin’s narrative to scarce and expensive, on the way to the outrageous prices of the modern day.

The two World Wars are largely responsible for the decrease in truffle supply, and the increase of their cost, at least in France. Not only did the wars change the physical landscapes where truffles grew, but the movement of people from rural areas to urban areas affected the landscape in other ways. Truffle-growing areas also lost a lot of the knowledge with this migration. Italy and Spain, too, experienced decreased truffle production throughout the 20^th century, but not on the same scale as France. The French truffle industry has never recovered, and production today is a speck of dust compared to what it was in the first decade of the 20^th century.

The reason truffles cost so much today is not just because they are scarce but because they are almost impossible to farm. Truffles are mostly wild, and, historically, attempts to plant and cultivate them have been futile. Recently, there has been some more work done on farming truffles, but it’s not easy or cheap. Wild truffles grow underground, and only for a few months of the year. They are difficult to find and require considerable time and labor. To make matters worse, truffles are notoriously quick to spoil. They start to lose their aroma the moment they are pulled from the earth, and last no longer than a week. As a result, shipping them quickly across the world – most truffles are harvested in Spain, France, Italy, and parts of the Pacific Northwest of the US – is expensive, further increasing the cost for the end consumer.

Despite technological advances in other areas, the harvesting of truffles has remained almost unchanged for centuries. The June 1, 1872 issue of Scientific American describes the truffle hunt. People leased land on which truffles grew, and during truffle season, they used small dogs trained to find the fungus. The dogs cost about $20 each, not an insignificant amount at the time. “When the trained dog comes on the scent,” the article says, “the truffle hunter proceeds to hoe up the ground pointed out by the animal as the bed of the truffles.” Pigs were also used in the south of France. Truffle hunters still use dogs and pigs today, and the process is more or less the same.

It should come as no surprise, that, in the 21^st century, climate change is the main threat to the truffle industry, including the still-young industry that is farming black truffles (white truffles are still not farmed). Droughts and heatwaves have affected the quality and the quantity of truffle harvests. Truffles need consistent rainfall and moderate temperatures, both of which have been more and more disrupted in recent times. This has been especially a problem in truffle-growing places like Southern Europe, which have gotten hotter. In turn, northern climates like those of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom are starting to become a more serious possibility for the farming of truffles as their winters become milder. The UK’s first harvest of Périgord black truffles, the most prized black truffle variety, took place in March, 2017.

The COVID-19 pandemic, too, had a large and detrimental impact on the nascent truffle farming industry, as well as on traditional wild harvests. The restrictions of movement for the labor force, and some very strict lockdowns, meant that truffle foragers couldn’t harvest truffles in the quantities they had before the pandemic. Supply was low and the added difficulties of transportation and shipping with their many delays and border closures caused a large portion of what was harvested to spoil. Demand was low as well. People weren’t going to restaurants, so restaurants weren’t buying truffles, causing an oversupply in some areas and, again, spoiled truffles. The resulting prices were inconsistent, with prices in areas with oversupply low and prices in areas with undersupply high.

According to some scientists, there might be a silver lining to the effects of the pandemic on truffle harvests. Maybe, the unharvested truffles will enhance biodiversity in the forest. Or, perhaps, the spores from the decomposing truffles will boost future harvests. Experts are still not sure what the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will be on this industry.

Going back to the original question, whether truffled turkeys were really a menu item, the answer is an emphatic “yes.” It comes up often enough in the form of recipes, passing discourse, and other cultural references. According to Alexis Soyer’s 1851 The Modern Housewife, or Ménagère, truffled turkey, or, as he calls it, turkey with truffles, dates to 1720s France, when Guillaume Dubois introduced truffles at his dinners, and the Duke of Orleans gave them to his mistress. This might explain Brillat-Savarin’s comment about truffled turkeys and “kept women.” Brillat-Savarin alone mentions truffled turkey on multiple occasions. In Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery (1892), he is quoted as saying that “in our highest gastronomical societies, when politics are obliged to give way to dissertations on matters of taste, what is desired, what is awaited, what is looked out for at the second course? A truffled turkey.” “In my ‘Secret Memoirs,’” he goes on, “I find sundry notes recording that on many occasions its restorative juice has illumined diplomatic faces of the highest eminence.” In “Varieties XXVII” of The Physiology of Taste, he writes of Adam and Eve “what would you not have given for a truffled turkey hen? But in your Earthly Paradise you had no cooks, no fine confectioners! I weep for you!” Rossini, the Italian composer, is said to have confessed that he had wept three times in his life, one of them being “when, with a boating party, a truffled turkey fell into the water.” In 1894, The Catholic Telegraph described Christmas in Paris, where they said a material sign of the holiday was truffled turkey.

The French phenomenon, given the influence of French cuisine in the United States and the abundance of French chefs, crossed the proverbial pond and jumped straight onto the plates of the American elite. A journal article published in 1876 describing an American independence centennial celebration, lists truffled turkey as part of a meal served. The Epicurean, a cookbook originally published in 1894 by French-born and trained Charles Ranhofer, former chef of New York City’s iconic restaurant Delmonico’s, has a recipe for truffled turkey that puts the opulence of Escoffier’s to shame. It calls not for 1.5 pounds of truffles, not even 2 pounds. It calls for an eyewatering and wallet draining 3 pounds of truffles for an 8-to-10-pound turkey. One ounce short of twice as much as Escoffier’s recipe. This aligns with the immense wealth of Gilded Age robber barons, and how much they could afford to spend. Truffles weren’t cheap in the United States even then.

In Spain, too, truffled turkey, or “pavo trufado,” was a Christmas special. It makes an appearance on the December 1^st, 1915 issue of El Gorro Blanco, a monthly culinary magazine published in Madrid. This turkey, of course, had a Spanish flair, with the addition of Jerez sherry, ham, and nutmeg.

Even as late as 1944, truffled turkey was a favorite of some people. Henry Sigerist, a French-born Swiss medical historian at Johns Hopkins University, wrote “a roast turkey prepared in the good old American way with New England stuffing, and served with a cranberry sauce is a great dish, but I prefer my turkey truffled and served with a sauce Périgueux.” He then proceeds to explain his process, and although he does not give us an exact amount of truffles, it looks like he did not skimp. Truffles are sliced and placed between the skin and the flesh of the turkey. More truffles are then added to the stuffing while cooking it, then more truffles – and foie gras – are added after the stuffing is cooled. The entire mixture is placed inside the turkey and the whole thing forgotten, as he says, for two days. During this period, “the meat exposed from all sides to a barrage of truffles, will become impregnated with their delicate flavor.” As if that wasn’t enough, the Périgueux sauce has even more truffles.

Sigerist lamented that, although he used to prepare this truffled turkey often, at the time, there were no truffles. World War II was raging in Europe. The Périgord, he says, where the truffles he used were harvested, was under Nazi occupation. But even if the Allies had “reconquered” it, “the Nazi General Staff would have eaten up the last crop anyway.”

This preparation Sigerist relates is called, according to a 1979 issue of The New York Times, “dindonneau en demi-deuil,” or turkey in half-mourning. It is also truffled, but more subtle than the traditional truffled turkey. They give a full recipe, which they call “Truffled turkey with supreme sauce.” But, alas, it calls for a relatively modest quarter cup of diced black truffles for a 12-pound turkey, a reflection of the cost of truffles at the time. No truffles go in the sauce.

As intriguing as truffled turkey sounds with all the praises, I’m afraid it must remain an indulgence of Ranhofer’s American Gilded Age, of Escoffier’s Belle Époque, or the earlier times when Brillat-Savarin wrote. When the rich were obscenely rich, truffle harvests were large, and the prices hadn’t yet ballooned to what they are today, even if they were never truly cheap. In today’s money, Escoffier’s truffled turkey, which is one of the most modest ones, would cost about $1500 in truffles alone. This is assuming you are using burgundy black truffles, which Brillat-Savarin scorned on account that “they are hard, and are deficient in farinaceous matter.” Farinaceous matter is a substance that has high amounts of starch. Périgord black truffles, of course, cost more. If you want to use white truffles, you are looking at anywhere between $7500 and $12,500, depending on the size of the truffles. Never mind that you’ll cut them up anyway. I got these prices from Eataly in New York City. We can see plainly why truffled turkey, in all its glory, is a relic of the past. Weep for us.

recently published a post about truffle hunts in modern Italy. Give it a read!

Elisabeth Luard's Cookstory

How to train your truffle-hound

It's truffle-time in the Sienese hills. The season for Tuber magnatum, the rich man’s truffle (magnatum, of-the-magnate - sounds about right) runs from late September till the end of January, just i…

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a year ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Elisabeth Luard

This year, I want to share a more seasonal version of flan, which is also very popular in Cuba. It’s flan de calabaza, or pumpkin flan. And I mean seasonal for our American sensibilities that equate pumpkin with fall.

To be clear, the pumpkins available in Cuba are different from the sugar pumpkins in the United States. They are different types of hard squashes. Cuban calabazas look more like butternut squash than pie pumpkin. The flavor, of course, is different, but not so much that they can’t be used interchangeably.

In fact, in the US, unless you make puree from fresh pumpkins, you are likely making your pumpkin pie with butternut squash or any other number of hard squashes that are not necessarily what you think of as pumpkin. Since at least 1957, the USDA  has put pumpkins and squashes under the same category, and essentially seen them as one and the same.  So even though your can of pumpkin puree says 100% pumpkin, it could very well be something else, either partly or wholly. And that is OK with the FDA too.

But, in the greater scheme of things, that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that, if you’re making your puree, you never use the type of pumpkin sold for carving Halloween decorations. These are known as jack-o’-lantern or field pumpkins, and while technically edible, they are stringy and just not generally pleasant to eat. Sugar pumpkins, also known as pie pumpkins, look like miniature versions of their carving cousins. 

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I’ve been thinking about how to speak about this because it is a story of lifelong dreams coming true but also a story of failure. A failure that feels mine, but that I’ve come to understand is a failure in “the system,” and not entirely a personal one.

I have lived and breathed food for a very long time. Long enough and deeply enough to have dedicated seven years of my life to a PhD researching food in history and writing about it. My intention was, as with most people who pursue a PhD, to become a college professor and continue researching and writing food history. But that did not happen, and it didn’t happen on my own terms. At least a year before I defended my dissertation, I decided that I was not going to pursue an academic job for a variety of reasons. As much as I loved the research and writing, the other aspects of academia did not align with the sort of life I wanted, and still want, to live. Also, very importantly, I have a family whose needs and lives I also needed to take into consideration. This is a topic that I could write an entire post about!

A few months before I defended, I landed what seemed like a stellar job, teaching history in a private school. For a while, I thought that would be my forever career, even though deep down I mourned not doing food history. It is true that there are many independent food scholars, but it is incredibly difficult to do without institutional support. And I don’t just mean financial; I made more as a secondary education teacher than most college professors I know. I mean support in the form of university-level library access, access to peers, networking and research opportunities, and things like that. Not to mention being taken seriously by academics who, as a whole, tend to forget people who do history outside the confines of academia exist and are good at what they do. So teaching is what I did.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself out of the job just days before Christmas 2022. I didn’t see it coming, and I had been given no indication that it was coming. And I was … relieved. I would have likely not quit my job had this not come up, giving up income is hard, but I now had a world of opportunity to do whatever I wanted.

And what I wanted was to write about food. To research food. To think about food. Both in history and in current times. And so, this Substack iteration of Historical Foodways was born in February 2023. But, as we all know, it is near impossible for most people on the platform to make a living here. Substack is a passion project, but I don’t even break even. So, I also looked for work in food media. My first application was pretty successful, and I made it almost through the entire hiring process, but in the end someone else got the job. And then, nothing. Nothing at all for over a year. Nothing at all. I can’t even count the number of applications I submitted to countless publications, websites, and other food and culinary-related companies. I applied to writing, editing, recipe development, and food photography jobs, etc., all of which I have extensive experience in. Crickets.

Out of desperation, I even applied to the same types of jobs I had done before going to graduate school. Jobs I have a history of doing well and can do with my eyes closed. Nothing.

I did pitch and publish one story, and realized that freelance writing as my only job is just not for me. I had a wonderful editor and the process was painless and quite reassuring, but, ultimately, I don’t want to be purely a freelance writer.

The longer I looked for a full-time job, the more depressed I got and the more worthless I felt. Moving from academia and teaching to food media has proven to be a very difficult career switch. I knew getting a job in this industry would be difficult, but I didn’t think it would be impossible. Being new to the industry, I have no contacts, I have no way in other than my resume. And that seemed wholly insufficient.

Naturally, I started to take it personally and was quite angry at the world. But then I kept reading about so many other people having trouble getting work not just in food media and publishing, but in pretty much every other industry as well. Despite my own feelings, I began to realize that it was not me, or at least not just me. It is just really tough out there.

Armed with that knowledge, which I have to keep reminding myself about whenever I start to spiral, I began thinking about how I could make myself a more competitive candidate for the jobs I wanted. I am determined to work “in food,” as KC Hysmith put it, because it makes me happy, not just because I have invested the better part of two decades in it. First, I considered getting a master’s in journalism, since that is the avenue that most appeals to me. But I just didn’t have it in me to go back to graduate school again. Many of the jobs I applied for wanted someone with the writing chops, which I think I’m set on, but also with formal culinary education. And so, the idea of going to culinary school became a serious consideration.

I first started looking into it last year, but at that time I had only been looking for full-time work for a few months and I was, in all my naivete, sure I’d get a job soon. Taking time for culinary school meant not working for as long as it took to complete, and giving up the possibility of an income for that long seemed preposterous.

But then this summer – a year and a half since the last time I had a full-time job – came around and I still was unemployed. With the support of my husband, I made the decision to put the job search on hold and go to culinary school as professional development. But also, as a way to feel like I was spending my time on something tangible, I guess. After being unemployed for so long, I really started to feel like I was wasting my time doing nothing. But I wasn’t doing nothing, of course. This was definitely the unhealthy American work culture getting to me, I realize.

It is worth noting that going to culinary school – pastry school, to be more precise – has been a lifelong dream of mine, so it’s not as though I had never thought about it before. It just never seemed like a viable choice. Funny how life works sometimes.

Living in NYC, I had a few choices for where to go. In the end, I chose the Culinary Arts program at Kingsborough Community College for a few reasons. First, I believe in public education, and, assuming the quality of instruction is not wildly different, I’d rather give my money (I get no financial aid) to a community college than to the for-profit institution with name recognition. If you know, you know. I am not looking for name recognition. Second, since I am paying out of pocket and I’m unemployed, money is an issue. A semester at a community college costs just over $2600, and I’ll be done in three semesters since I don’t have to do any of the Gen Ed courses because I already have a bachelor’s degree. That is $7,800, plus books. Tuition at the fancy private culinary school, on the other hand, is about $43,000.

Then there’s the consideration of time. The private school program runs five days a week, leaving little time for other things. The community college has a normal college schedule. I go to school three days a week, two of those being half days. This means that I have time to do other things, like write Historical Foodways, do some freelance work, should the opportunity arise, and, who knows, maybe even get a job in a bakery or restaurant for experience and learning.

And finally, I felt the program at the community college was much more well-rounded. They teach not only the practical aspect of the culinary industry, but also things like extensive culinary math, the financials of culinary institutions, extensive food safety and sanitation, etc. Plus, because it functions like a university, I can take other classes too. For example, I am in the Baking and Pastry program (if I have to get another qualification, I’ll do it in something I enjoy!), but I can also take “hot kitchen” classes. That is, traditional culinary school classes. I couldn’t have done that at the private school unless I did both the pastry arts and the culinary arts certificates, to the tune of nearly $70,000, maybe more. Even if I never go into the restaurant industry, these are all things that I apply to the work I do here on Historical Foodways and the work I hope to do once I finish culinary school. Overall, I felt the community college program was a better option for me.    

As of the publishing date of this post, I have been in school for almost two months, and, I have to say, I have loved every minute of it. The kitchen classes are chaotic, physically and mentally exhausting, and working with partners isn’t always great, but I feel so overwhelmed with joy in them that I really wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Maybe this is the honeymoon phase, but I hope that doesn’t change.

Don’t get me wrong, being back at community college after successfully completing a PhD is strange, for sure. But no stranger than not being able to find employment in my chosen field after having done everything “right,” education-wise, according to society. 

And let’s address the elephant in the room. The only reason I have been able to not just go to culinary school, but to have been able to look for work for an entire year without an income is because I have a husband who made different career choices. He has been my biggest support in so many ways for almost 20 years (we were babies when we met!). And my biggest cheerleader. That is not to say it hasn’t been difficult; losing an income in a two-income family is hard and compromises had to be made. We are not independently wealthy.

What this means for Historical Foodways is that you might see a bit of my experience in school every now and then in the form of a post. It will also almost certainly influence the recipe development I do here. Otherwise, for now, not much will change.

I truly believe that being formally trained in culinary arts will be a terrific asset to me as a food and culinary historian and food writer. Let’s hope prospective employers agree!

Thank you for reading this far. I appreciate you being here and I appreciate your support.

What I’ve Been Reading and Eating

• Being in the throes of culinary school inspired me to read The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, by Kathleen Flinn. Flinn is a journalist who got laid off from her job and decided to go to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. A trajectory not that dissimilar to mine. It was light reading, and I actually listened to it on audio while doing chores.

• I was on Reddit a couple of months ago and read a recommendation for Tom Vitale’s In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain so I decided to read it. As a Bourdain fan, this book really put his whole persona into perspective. If you don’t want to take Bourdain down a peg from that pedestal we’ve collectively put him on, maybe don’t read this book.

• I was inspired to make the ohn no khao swè (Burmese chicken coconut noodle soup) from The Chicken Soup Manifesto and it was so good. I’ve talked about this book before, I love it. I have made many of the recipes and they’ve all been great.

  

This topic is near and dear to my heart. I am always in search of great Cuban cookbooks, both classic and modern, to add to my collection. I am very particular though about these books, and very critical of their content. These are the books in my collection that pass muster, or that I otherwise think are must-haves.

I am dividing this list into three categories: The Original Classics. The English Classics. And The Modern Takes on Cuban Cuisine.

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Some of the links in this post are affiliate links.

This recipe started out not with squid but with octopus. But sometimes things just do not work out the way you think they will, and that is OK.

I was looking through my translated version of The Book of Sent Soví (Llibre de Sent Soví), a 14th century Catalan cookbook, when I came across a recipe titled “To Stuff Octopus,” (A Farcir Polp), and I immediately thought “I have to make that!”

And so the comedy of errors began and it was not smooth sailing.

But I will get to that in a minute.

First, a little bit about the book. Llibre de Sent Soví is one of the first European culinary texts not in Latin, and the first known Catalan cookbook. It originated in Valencia, although there is another manuscript from Barcelona. Scholars believe that rather than having been penned by a single individual, the text is a collection of recipes by various people, who added, and deleted, recipes at various times.

During its time, and in the following century, the book was highly influential in European culinary circles, and recipes from it appear in a variety of cookery texts from as far away as Southern Italy.

The Crown of Aragon, where the Llibre de Sent Soví originated, was a maritime empire that at its zenith encompassed much of the Mediterranean. As such, it is entirely not surprising that a book clearly written for elite households contains a recipe for octopus or squid, even when in contemporary society, at least in other parts of Europe, those creatures were not first-choice foods.

Octopus and squid were considered to be some of the toughest sea creatures to digest, and so they were categorized as poor people’s foods, whose hardworking bodies and digestive tracts could process them.¹

And yet, here it is, a recipe for octopus.

“LVII To Stuff Octopus

If you want to stuff octopus or squid, take the octopus and wash it well, boil it, cut off the arms, and take out what is inside. Chop [the arms] all together with parsley, mint, marjoram and other good herbs. You can chop another kind of fish if the tentacles are not enough. Put in the best spices that you can find. Make sure that the octopus is cleaned well. Put in the stuffing, and put in raisins and scalded garlic and fried onion. Then make almond milk with the broth that has boiled the fish, and put it in a bowl or a casserole together with the octopus; in the milk you can put a little verjuice and good spices, the best you might have, and oil. You can cook it in the oven or on an iron trivet with live coals beneath.”²

So, armed with that information, off I went to find whole octopus in my neighborhood. I thought that it would be difficult, but the first fishmonger I went to had it. Although grocery shopping in New York City can sometimes feel like you have to go to 10 places to find the ingredients to put a meal together, the small size of stores means that oftentimes they specialize.

In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, aside from the quintessential bodegas and a handful of “supermarkets,” there are no fewer than 3 fishmongers, plus there are butchers, cheese shops, etc. So, at least in this instance, this compartmentalization worked in my favor.

At any rate, I bought a whole, frozen, octopus, brought it home, and began defrosting it right away, in the fridge, so that I could use it the next day.

I had never cooked octopus before but there I was on a Sunday morning, holding this creature in my hands and dropping it into boiling water.

When I pulled it out about half an hour later, it became very clear to me that something was not right. There was absolutely no way that I could fit all those tentacles, even if finely chopped, into that octopus’ head.

I was disappointed, but it was also a learning moment and it’s moments like this that make me realize why cooking foods and recipes from the past is such a valuable tool in understanding the past. It truly is experimental history.

I realized that the octopus the recipe writer in the 14th century used could not have been the same sort, size, age, etc. octopus that I, a 21st century cook, used. Maybe his (invariably it was a he) octopus was young and small, with a larger head to tentacle ratio. Maybe it was a different type of octopus entirely and the octopus available to him then, in Cataluña (Catalunya in the native language), was not the same octopus available to me here in New York today.

Whatever his octopus was, it was not this. And mine was not his.

Thankfully, the recipe writer himself gave me a plan B when, in the first sentence of the recipe, he wrote “or squid.”

So off I went to look for squid large enough to stuff.

The ones I found had already been cleaned, a point that the recipe writer makes sure to tell us more than once, but they were also separated into bodies and tentacles, so I had to play a bit of a guessing game to figure out how much I needed.

This time I was sure I could make it work.

Here is the recipe as I made it:

Stuffed Squid from The Book of Sent Soví

4 large clean squid, plus tentacles (you can use other fish if the tentacles are not enough)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 shallot, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
¹/₄ cup mixed chopped herbs (parsley, mint, marjoram, and sage)
¹/₈ tsp ground ginger
2 tbsp chopped raisins
salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce:

¹/₂ cup slivered almonds
1 cup squid boiling broth
1 tbsp sugar
¹/₈ tsp ground pepper
¹/₄ tsp ground ginger
a pinch ground nutmeg
the oil from frying the garlic and onions
fresh grated ginger

Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil. Drop the squid and tentacles into the water, and simmer for 2 minutes.

With a slotted spoon, remove the squid and tentacles from the water and allow them to cool down.

While the squid cools, make the sauce. Blend the almonds, squid broth, sugar, ground pepper, ground ginger, and nutmeg until smooth. Run the mixture through a nut bag to get rid of the solids, reserving the liquid.

Preheat your oven to 350°F

In a frying pan over medium heat, cook the shallot and garlic in the olive oil, making sure not to burn them, until they are aromatic and golden brown. Carefully, transfer the garlic and shallot to a medium bowl, leaving the oil behind, which will be used in the sauce.

When the squid is cool, chop the tentacles into small pieces and add to the bowl with the garlic and shallot. Add the chopped herbs, ground ginger, chopped raisins, and salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly.

Stuff each squid with as much filling as it will take. The squid has already shrunk so it will not shrink any more, and will hold the filling in without the need for toothpicks to hold the opening closed. You may have filling left over.

Place the stuffed squid into a small oven-proof casserole. Mix the almond milk sauce with the garlic and shallot oil, add some fresh grated ginger, and pour into the casserole with the squid.

Place the casserole in the oven for 20 minutes, turning the squid over once halfway through cooking to stop the tops from drying out.

The sauce will thicken considerably.

Serve while hot.

Serves 2

As you can see, I left the verjuice out because it was not an ingredient I could find locally at the last minute. But because it was a suggestion, I was OK with that.

Aside from the almond milk, which was a staple of medieval cuisine, and maybe the raisins, these stuffed squid are virtually indistinguishable from modern ones. If I served this to someone without telling them it is from a 14th century recipe, I doubt they would find anything amiss.

Yet, the experience of cooking it, of putting these ingredients together that seem to us today like they should not work, felt extremely odd! Almond milk made with squid juice, for goodness sake!

But it’s only strange if you think of it as almond milk. If, instead, you think of it as a sauce that happens to be thickened with almonds, it suddenly does not feel so far removed from modern tastes. There are plenty of modern recipes that use almonds this way.

I was expecting the sauce to taste very fishy because the broth smelled fishy, but it did not. I also sort of expected it to be a little bit sweet because of the sugar, but, again, it was not. Instead, it was savory and smooth, and complemented the squid.

The recipe does not say how to make the almond milk. But there is a recipe for almond milk in the same book, which is how I settled on how to make it.

But if you want a medieval recipe for almond milk without the squid, I have one of those too!

The squid itself did not taste sweet despite the raisins. The only flaw I could find with the entire dish was that it was too minty for my taste. I do not like mint in my food, but I wanted to make the recipe as directed so I included it. If I was making this recipe without regard for historical accuracy, I would just leave the mint out.

By the time I got to try the dish, after taking all the photos, it was cold. I probably should have made more than two portions so that I could have tried it hot while also having food to photograph. Even then, the taste was good. I can only imagine it would have been even better hot.

But I did promise you a comedy of errors, and the octopus tentacles not fitting into the head alone does not count.

There was this.

Yes, I did not have the lid on the blender and did not realize the switch on the base was turned to “on” when I plugged the whole thing into the electrical outlet.

In my panic, the first thing I did was run away rather than unplug it. So while I was already covered in almond and squid juice 10 feet away from the blender, my kitchen proceeded to get a good saucing for a few more seconds.

I thought my apartment would smell like fish for years.

1. Ken Albala, Fish in Renaissance Dietary Theory, In Harlan Walker (Eds.), Fish: Food from the Waters (9–19). Totnes, Devon,England: Oxford Symposium/Prospect https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=cop-facbooks

2. Joan Santanach, ed. and Robin Vogelzang, trans., The Book of Sent Soví: Medieval Recipes from Catalonia (Barcelona: Barcino Tamesis, 2014), 157.

In that time, I never really thought about the past history of yeasts or why some places have historically used yeast and others sourdough, although, to be sure, the two often existed right alongside each other. It just didn’t occur to me to think about it. Then, one day not long ago, I was reading a book, can’t remember which one, and I came across a grain of information (see what I did there?) that made me go “of course!”

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