Victorian Cold Cream

Found a modernization of a Victorian cold cream recipe, and I've decided to make a couple batches to add to my soaps and baking as presents for people. The original recipe quoted on the page sounded interesting, and mostly simple:

Two ounces of oil of sweet almonds, half an ounce of spermaceti, a drachm of white wax and one ounce of rose water...

Auntie Kay's Mincemeat Recipe

Continuing with the old fashioned Christmas stuff, I decided to make some mince pies. Rather than search the net for recipes this time though, I decided to pull out an old recipe book that was written by my Great Aunt for my Gran on her wedding day in 1940. My mom has it now, and it's a really fascinating little book, with recipes for everything from ketchup to cough syrup. There are two recipes in it for mincemeat; I chose the first one purely because it made a smaller batch. Here's the recipe as it appears in the handwritten cookbook:

Visions of Sugar Plums?

So I was thinking the other day that even though I've heard about sugar plums every Christmas, I'd never actually seen, let alone eaten, one. After doing a little hunting around for recipes, thinking I was looking around for some way to preserve fruit, I found out that the visions of sugar plums dancing in my head were all wrong!

Turns out, they aren't plums at all, but rather a confection made from dried fruits and roasted nuts and/or spices combined with citrus peel and honey, formed into balls and rolled in powdered sugar. The word 'plum' was used in times past to describe several different round, sweet fruits or confections rather than the specific type of fruit we use the term for today. I decided to try making some with a Sugar plum recipe I found at Saveur to experience the real thing first hand. Here are the results:

Orange Clove Pomanders

Ok, I promise I will eventually get to the arcane, obscure and occult (sometimes literally) recipes of Ancient Rome and Iron Age Britain and such at some point. Trust me, it will get weird around here. But for now, I shall stick to the merely quaint and antiquated prettiness of the Victorian period.

Orange Clove Pomanders are an old idea, they make pretty decorations in both period and modern homes, and are pleasant, all natural air fresheners. They're also a simple, if time consuming, craft that can be done while watching TV. Kids would be perfectly safe doing it, but young ones might get bored or have sore fingers before the oranges are completely covered with cloves.

Welcome to The Anachronist's Cookbook!

What is this strange new blog? Well, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure yet. Right now, it's just a vague idea. You see, I'm a student in my last year of a BA in History. I want to continue my education on to a masters and possibly a PhD, but even though I love history, but I'm far more interested in the practical how's and what's of daily life in the past than I am in which person or political entity was in charge of a region at any given time. The history of the common people - what they ate, what they wore, what they did with their time - that's what fascinates me, and that's what this blog is going to be about. Kind of.

It will, at times, be a cookbook in the literal sense, as I intend to try out recipes from other times and various places and post both the recipes and the results here. There will be cooking recipes, probably dye recipes, soap, perfumes, maybe some other craftable items... I've always wanted to try making gunpowder...

Hopefully, it will be interesting enough to be worth your time, my dear reader.