Every recipe is a journey, passed from hand to hand, sometimes around the globe. Here’s the story of this recipe: a young woman leaves Australia at the beginning of World War II, on a shop bound for England. She finds herself in Istanbul, out of money, and hears about a position at the British Embassy in Moscow. She goes to Moscow and is interviewed by the man she later marries, and thus begins her life as the wife of a […]
Here is the original recipe: Two pints of flour, butter the size of an egg, three heaping teaspoonfuls of baking powder and one teaspoonful of salt; make a soft dough of sweet milk, knead as little as possible, cut out with the usual biscuit-cutter and bake in rather a quick oven. (I love that last part: ‘bake in a rather quick oven’!) Here’s the modern translation: Serves: 6 Prep time: One hour
I love old recipe books. When I was 17, I bought a 1905 version of “The White House Cookbook, a Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home” in an antique shop. It was so much more than a cookbook: it had a listing of the menus of the (Teddy) Roosevelt White House, proper etiquette, rules of dinner-giving, menus for the sick and – the best part – “health suggestions and facts worth knowing”. This was from a time when a […]
Serves: 6 Prep time: one hour
“Merry, merry, take a cherry, mine are sounder, mine are rounder, Mine are sweeter for the eater, when the dews fall, and you’ll be fairies all.” -Emily Dickinson Before the cherry season passes us by, I want to put up my mom’s cherry torte recipe. It has a chewy, meringue-y crust that is not too sweet. If you use canned cherry filling you can make this in about half the time, but it will be a much sweeter dessert. […]
