Sweets to the Sweaty

[emmelisa]

The Victorians were people who really knew their desserts.  Cakes, pies, puddings, custards, trifles, jellies -- you name it and you can find a recipe for it somewhere in a cookbook published between 1860 and 1900.  Usually an elaborate recipe, too.  These folks truly never met a saturated fat gram, a carbohydrate, or a calorie they didn't

Comments

[idlewild_]

Dude. At least when we had to make sponge cake in home ec, we got the mechanical egg beaters with the handle to make gears turn. (Um. It was still horrible.) I just cannot imagine how horrendous this whole process would be. I actually like creaming butter and sugar by hand, but that's because I'm a freak.

[emmelisa]

Ah, but do you beat them as faithfully as you beat your eggs? Or have you stopped beating your eggs?

Actually, I usually cream butter and sugar by hand, too, but I don't think the result would come up to Mrs. Harland's exacting standards. Although she would probably be delighted by a world in which butter, flour, sugar, et al. were all standardized (and sanitary!), and a bad egg was a thing almost unknown outside of '30s gangster movies.

So very, very much of the world she lived in is summed up in her recommendation not to mix fresh and "stale" milk in a cake because "it acts as disastrously as a piece of new cloth in an old garment." Her audience, accustomed to sewing many of their own garments, would have clearly understood just how disastrous this was. We, today, have trouble understanding the simile because not only don't we sew, the fabrics our clothes are made of aren't available for us to run out and purchase at the corner dry-goods store for repair purposes. (And would a piece of newer polyester shrink and pull an older

[idlewild_]

Well, all fabrics need to be pre-shrunk before sewing, but my gut instinct is that synthetics don't in fact behave as badly as other fabrics - but mending an older cotton or cotton/poly blend garment with anything with new cotton would have the same result.

But then, I was the only girl in my Brownie troop who didn't know how to use a sewing machine at age nine - where I grew up, these were still very much life skills one was expected to have.

The last time I separated eggs I needed the yolks for avgolemono soup - the whites went to the cocktail mixologist :D I don't think he beat them terribly hard.

[lolmac]

Man, when I was growing up, the eggs were so mean they beat us. But they were faithful about it, I'm sure. I never had an egg cheat on me.