Historical Christmas Cooking & Baking In America:
Favorite Family Recipes From The Colonies Through The Time Of The Civil War
Authored by Robert W. Pelton
Historical Christmas Cooking and Baking in America is chock full of delightfully delicious cooking ideas favored by many famous families of yesteryear.
It contains the prized recipes for those Christmas dishes served and eaten by some of the early settlers in the American Colonies.
Here will be found the favorite Yuletide dishes of some of the heroes of the Revolutionary War.
You’ll be able to fix and then eat the same things served to those great men who so bravely signed the Declaration of Independence and those involved in writing and signing our great Constitution.
You’ll be able to sample the identical food eaten at Christmas by those foreign heroes who volunteered to fight and die for our freedom.
And lastly, you can enjoy sharing an identical Christmas meal with those who wore both the blue and the gray during the War Between the States, or as some unreconstructed Southerners still refer to it, the War of Northern Aggression.
. Included are recipes for tasty Christmas breads and many other kinds of baked goods, really good meat and poultry dishes, soups and stews and stuffings – and, yes, even pickles as well as loads of other wonderful things.
Here you’ll also be treated to the Christmas favorites of such historical luminaries as Declaration of Independence signer, Elbridge Gerry, who dearly loved his poultry dishes accompanied by a special sausage stuffing.
Or the hollandaise sauce enjoyed by John Quincy Adams with his cauliflower.
And that special Christmas sourdough fruit cake made by the wife of the famed Confederate General, “Fighting Joe” Hooker.
A unique old-fashioned method for making yeast from grape leaves was handed down by my Great-great grandmother, Huldah Radike Horton.
This is the recipe she used in making the bread she served to her family every Christmas for many years.
And it was used to make the bread she served to General Lafayette (1757-1834) when she entertained him at her home in Newburg, New York in 1823.
Measurements were given in the past in ways that present day cooks wouldn’t be expected to be at all familiar.
Who today for example when busily scurrying around the kitchen would be able to accurately measure out a teacupful, ½ a tincup, a dessertspoonful or butter the size of an egg when called for in a recipe?
Now try butter the size of a walnut, a pound of eggs, a kitchencupful, or even a dram of liquid?
Or how about half a tumbler, a saltspoonful, a gill, wineglassful or a pound of milk?
Since this would create an insurmountable problem, all the recipes in Historical Christmas Cooking & Baking in America have been carefully updated so that when the recipe is used today it will turn out just as it did for the homemaker who prepared it for her family so many years ago.
A compilation of the unique measurements used by housewives of the past with their today’s counterparts can be found in Chapter 2 Measurements Used While Cooking and Baking In the Colonies.
, every recipe found in this unique book was a popular favorite throughout the Christmas holidays in our nation’s long and colorful history.
Many were coveted within a particular family and handed down from generation to generation.
Others are historical gems, for they were the inventions of, or the favorites of, some notable family or individual from the past.
Here they are being presented, for the first time for America’s families of today to have the fun and experience the thrill of cooking and baking.
And lastly, to thankfully pass a blessing over before eating – be it for breakfast, lunch or dinner – on Christmas Day.
8" x 10" (20.32 x 25.4 cm)
Black & White on White paper
204 pagesISBN-13: 978-1491031339 (CreateSpace-Assigned)
ISBN-10: 1491031336
BISAC: Cooking / Holiday / General