Can You Guess The Secret Spice? - Christmas Cookies From 1796 - 18th Century Cooking

Christmas is one of my family's favorite times of year. It's a wonderful holiday, you know, lots of decorations, special food, special traditions, and I so want that to be true for colonial America in the 18th century, you know, 1775, and what are they doing for Christmas, and we can kind of envision this, we can put our Christmas and kind of plug it into colonial America and think it's wonderful, but it's just not there. You know, you do the research and Christmas is something completely different, not anything like what we would expect for colonial Christmas. We can't just take our Christmas and plug it in to 250 years ago because it doesn't work. Here are the books that tell us some about what Christmas is like in colonial America. First, Thomas Turner's Diary. He's not in America, he's in Sussex, England, and he writes about Christmas, and yeah, they go and they visit people on Christmas. It's more about visiting. It's, you know, not necessarily a special food, but it's going around and maybe parties, right? In fact, about February 7th in one of the years, he says, whoo, Christmas season's finally over, we can stop visiting people because he's talking about being an introvert, not wanting to go through all that visiting. Matthew Patton's Diary. He's in New Hampshire and he's writing in the middle of the century from 1754 to 1788. And so, in New England, he is very particular. This is his day book diary about what he does for business. And, you know, we can go to a typical December 25th. And let's see, December 25th, I attended a Colonel Joff's on a case. I sued Ebenezer Farley, but he did not appear. He was in court. They had court on December 25th? That's just, I mean, we wouldn't connect that at all. Other days on December 25th, he's making parts for shoes or, you know, he's taking grain to the mill. That's not Christmas, right? We can get a lot of ideas, but sometimes we need to find somebody who's really going to explain it to us. So, Peter Calm, he's from Sweden. He comes to America and he's going to explain things back to people in Sweden. Well, he's really helpful because he can explain stuff to us 250 years later. So, let me see if I could find the page here. He writes about Christmas, two different places. He writes this on January 5th. He says, Christmas Day was celebrated today, January 5th, by the Swedes and the English, for they still use the old calendar. So, there's a calendar thing going on in the middle of the 18th century. There's like a 10-day shift. Anyway, members of the English church hardly make any bigger preparations for Christmas than for any Sunday. When it came on a weekday, it was not celebrated any more than the Swedish Apostles' Day. The Quakers paid still less attention to it, for since they observe no other holiday except Sunday, they work on Christmas Day just as on any other day unless it comes on a Sunday. He writes about it in one more place. And here he says, there was no baking of bread for the Christmas festival, no Christmas porridge on Christmas Eve. Christmas porridge. I love that idea. One did not seem to know what it meant to wish another one Merry Christmas. However, I have heard several members of the English church wish one another a happy Christmas holiday. There we go. A couple of quick ideas about what's going on with Christmas. One of these other books said, well, Christmas is hardly ever really celebrated by any other than the Dutch. So, we know that the Dutch immigrants are the ones that are the most likely to celebrate Christmas. Well, thankfully, we do have someone who helps us a little bit and gives us some Christmas tradition. This is Amelia Simmons' American Cookery Cookbook. It's done right at the end of the 18th century, 1796. She's from that New York area. It does have a Dutch influence in the cooking. And she gives us a recipe for another Christmas cookie. So, we do have something for Christmas. We can finally make something that gives us an idea for colonial Christmas. So, let's make another Christmas cookie. So, this recipe is really important. This cookbook is really important for several different reasons. But this one's titled Another Christmas Cookie. It's funny because it doesn't say, like the one above it doesn't say Christmas cookies. It says cookies. And then it says another Christmas cookies. Like, well, Christmas is the only time you make cookies. I guess. Maybe. It's hard to say. She doesn't explain that completely. Another really important thing here is this is the first cookbook that I know of, English cookbook, that shows up with chemical leavening. Something that makes your cookies light and fluffy with a chemical instead of using yeast or maybe, you know, you might leaven it with something like eggs that you whip up. But nope, nope. This uses chemical leavening. And that's definitely a Dutch tradition that does not show up in English cookbooks in the 18th century at all, ever. So, here we've got that. Let's read the recipe for Another Christmas Cookie. Two, three pounds of flour. So, add two, three pounds of flour. Sprinkle a teacup of fine powdered coriander seed. Rub in one pound of butter and one and a half pounds of sugar. Dissolve three teaspoonfuls of perolash. That's our chemical leavening. Perolash in a teacup of milk. Knead all it well together. Roll three quarters of an inch thick. That's massive. We're not going to do it that thick. And cut or stamp into shape or size you please. So, there's this idea of decorating. Bake slowly 15 or 20 minutes. Though hard and dry at first, the cookies, if you put into in an earthen pot or and a dry cellar or a damp room, they will be finer and softer and better when six months old. Can you imagine? You're going to like July 25th, you're going to be making Christmas cookies and then you're going to put them down in your basement so they're soft in time for Christmas. I don't think we need to worry about that. I've gone ahead and we're going to make a one-third recipe because this will make a bazillion cookies. You don't want this many. Well, I would eat them all. Anyway, we're going to make a one-third size recipe here. Let's start off with the chemical leavening part of this. You say, John, chemical leavening, I've never heard of it. I don't know what you're talking about. Anytime you're using baking soda or baking powder, that's chemical leavening. It's making a fizzy thing going on. In our recipe, she uses pearl ash. That's an old primitive version. That's actually made from ashes from trees. You burn up a whole bunch of trees. We used to have so many trees, we didn't know what to do. We'd burn them all down. We'd take the ashes and then we'd turn them into pearl ash, which turns out to be potassium carbonate. It's a very weak version of what turns out to be later on sodium bicarbonate. She uses three teaspoons of pearl ash. We don't need nearly as much. This is a cut-down recipe, but we need about half as much of baking soda, which is our closest equivalent to pearl ash. I've got here a half a teaspoon. That's not very much at all. Half a teaspoon, and we're going to dissolve that into four ounces of milk. Just regular whole milk will work fine. Next, we're going to mix in these dry ingredients. I've got the butter and the sugar. They're the easiest two things to get started with mixing. I'm just going to take a spoon here. I could soften this butter up a lot. I don't think I want it to be too softened. I don't want it to be super hard out of the refrigerator. You're going to break your arm getting these mixed in, but let's get the sugar and butter creamed together. Again, we're making a third of a recipe, so I have a half a pound of sugar and a third of a pound of butter. Now, I'm going to mix our coriander into the flour, and we have a pound of flour and a quarter cup of coriander ground. You want to make sure that it's nice and fresh coriander. This is the only spice in here. It doesn't even have nutmeg, so you want to make sure that coriander's got a bite to it. If you need to, get some coriander seed and actually grind it up. If you want some really fresh, you want all of that coriander flavor. We've got our coriander. I mixed it in with the flour. Now, we're just going to drop it in to our already creamed butter and sugar and get that all mixed up. We've got our dry ingredients and the butter all mixed nicely together. It's looking really good. I think that our baking soda is all dissolved, so it's ready to pour in. Our cookie dough is ready to roll out on the table. Let me clear off this table. We'll roll this out. Cut these into any decorative shape you like, just as Amelia Simmons directed, and these go into the oven. She calls for 15 to 20 minutes. With this kind of leavening, yeah, I would set your timer at 15 minutes and check them. You'll probably need to stay in there till 20 minutes. Bake it around 325 or so. It goes in a slow oven, as they say. So, let's get these in the oven because I want to eat them. Okay, these are just out of the oven, and they smell really, really good. I mean, I really want to try these. I'm going to hold off for just a second, though. I want to talk about the leavening. So, I spent a lot of time talking about the leavening on these. I did do a few of these cookies earlier with the pearl ash leavening. Remember at the end, she talks about them being hard? Well, they are a good bit harder. They aren't nearly as fluffy. We might even, to get closer to the historical cookie, as it were, take that amount of leavening, the sodium bicarbonate, the baking soda, and half it again because here's one of the ones. There it is. It breaks open. It's not so hard you can't break it, but there's not very much fluffiness here. Here is the one that just came out of the oven, still warm. It breaks open. It's very soft, and there's a good bit more fluffiness, little air pockets in there. So, I don't think these would get nearly as hard so that you have to, you know, put them in your basement for six months before you eat them. Definitely leavened more. They puff up a little bit more. You can tell these started out as squares, and they pretty much end up as squares. These kind of grew a little bit in the oven. Isn't that interesting? Coriander is the only spice in here? I'm intrigued. No nutmeg, no cinnamon, no cloves, none of those things that we typically think of as Christmas. In fact, why does she think these are Christmas at all? Unless just the idea that a cookie goes with Christmas. I'll bet you that's the connection. The first one said cookie, and then another one said another Christmas cookie, like, well, cookies, you make them at Christmas time. It's the only time you make them. Every day is Christmas for me. Coriander. Okay, perfect cookie texture as far as I'm concerned. Wonderful flavor. I would never guess that a coriander cookie is going to taste like this, and it's really, really good. It's got the right amount of sweetness, not too sweet, like some cookies can be today. I don't taste any of the leavening, which can be one of those things that can be, you know, it's like, oh, too much leavening, and you get, you know, doesn't taste good. These are perfect. I can exactly see why these would be Christmas cookies, and yeah, I want to eat every single one of them. It's great to be able to reach back into 18th century cookbooks and find something I can directly connect with Christmas. Thank you, Amelia Simmons. She did such a great job, and I can't wait to add these into my current Christmas tradition because I think they taste wonderful. We've got a direct connect, and I'll be eating a lot of these in the future. Thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century. Merry Christmas.