Let's eat history!

Ever since I found this little gem (left) on the website of the university of Umeå, I've been wanting to try out some of the recipes.

My plan is to find three recipes that

1:o aren't downright nasty
2:o don't contain ingredients that are more or less impossible to find nowadays
3:o makes sense

and cook and serve them as a three-course dinner, which isn't the period correct way but more practical (and better for my economy).

Miss Ellinor will of course help me: she's the one who goes to restaurant school after all. And her father/my husband will be forced to taste everything and give us a review.

So now I'm going to do research and hopefully make the stuff on Thursday next week (payday!) .

Disastrous? Probably, but some disasters are funnier than others. Stay tuned for messy kitchen experiments...

The Toilet Of Flora

What a find!

While doing my daily lurking at 18c Woman, I stumbled over a true gem, posted by none other than Chole, who is the person behind Slightly Obsessed and clearly quite awesome:

The Toilet Of Flora;
Or,
A Collection
Of The
Most Simple And Approved
Methods Of Preparing
Baths,
Essences,
Pomatums,
Powders,
Perfumes
And
Sweet-scented Waters

With Recepits for cosmetics of every kind, that can smooth and brighten the SKIN, give force to BEAUTY And take off the appearance of OLD AGE and DECAY

There's over 300 recipes for everything from snuff to soap to "cosmetic juice" to "An excellent Preservative balsam against the plague" - I can swear the book has everything except a liniment against flesh-eating zombies, but maybe it's because I haven't looked close enough.

Sorry guys, but it says clearly that it is FOR THE USE OF THE LADIES (which makes me ponder about "A liniment to change the Beard and Hair black", but should a lady wish to dye her beard black I suppose it's an excellent method. Unless you're allergic to lead and tar).

I'm so going to try some of these recipes one day soon. I suppose there must be a few that aren't absolutely fatal, and once I figure out what all of the ingredients actually are, and where I can obtain them, I'll report back.

Oh, and the best part about all this? The book is available at Google Books, downloadable as a PDF. Yes, please!

Bitter oranges!

When I was in the grocery store today I spotted a big pile of bitter oranges!

I was rather thrilled (yes, thrilled by citrus! Imagine what the rest of my day was like...) because I don't think I've ever seen fresh bitter oranges in the stores here in Sweden before, only dried pieces intended for baking and such. But that may just have been me not paying enough attention.

Anyway, why I got so excited about these little fruits is because bitter orange is the key ingredient if you're going to make bischoff:

Recipe from Museum of Wine And Spirits in Stockholm, adapted from a 1755 recipe:

• 5 fresh bitter oranges
• 1 bottle of French red wine
• 3 deciliters of sugar

Peel the oranges and heat them in a saucepan until they are well done but not burned.

Put them in a punch bowl together with the sugar and squeeze the juice out with a spoon.

Put the wine in, stir well, and let it soak for two hours with a plate covering the bowl.

If you use champagne, you get "Cardinal" and with white wine from the Rhine district you get "Archbishop"!

It's very tasty and great for parties, but I don't know if the kind I've had was made from bitter oranges, or lemons or ordinary oranges.

Back in the good old days of the 18th century, it wasn't uncommon to own potted trees which supplied with fresh bitter oranges at low cost! Swedish Märta Helena Reenstierna, whose claim-to-fame is the unique diary which she kept between the years 1793-1839, owned several trees which gave plenty of fruit for all her boozing-it-up needs (I was playing with the thought of planting a seed from a fruit myself, but I soon learned that it will take 10-15 years before the first harvest. The idea of a plant surviving with me for 15 years? Lulzy.)

Anyway, all you kitched goddesses (and gods) - do you think it would be possible to store bitter oranges in the freezer for some months, since I fear that the supply won't last long here (which reminds me that I already have 2 litres of blackthorn berries in the freezer waiting for further investigation... Oh well!). I suppose they would become all mushy but since they'd be squeezed to death in the punch bowl anyway, maybe it wouldn't matter too much?