I was going to share some 1815 era advice about “Turkies” but the Swedish Method of Fattening Turkies is brutal at best and anyway, for those of you celebrating Thanksgiving, it’s too late to fatten your bird in that manner.
I can, however, share To Make Chocolate From Cocoa Nuts
Chocolate is made of the small cocao bean separated from its shells, which being first coarsely pounded in a stone mortar, is afterward levigated on a slab of the finest grained marble; to this a small quantity of vanilla is added. The mixture is heated, and put into tin molds of the size in which the cakes appear.
I’m still getting my head around the size of the tin molds which appears to be recursively defined.
Then there’s this, which I advise you to read closely as it applies to most everyone who reads this.
Coffee
[blah blah blah Coffee] and when mixed with a large proportion of milk, is a proper article of diet for literary and sedentary people.
Woot! I had Vietnamese coffee when I was in New York and it was awesome. There was a pretty good proportion of cream in it, too. We were talking about books mostly and there you have it. The wisdom of the ages.
File this one under LIES and Inventions Before Their Time
Cheap and valuable Substitute for Coffee
The flour of rye, and English yellow potatoes, are found an excellent substitute for coffee. These ingredients are first boiled, then made into a cake, which is to be dried in an oven, and afterwards reduced to a powder, which will make a beverage very similar to coffee in its taste, as well as in other properties, and not in the least detrimental to health.
You see what this is? It’s not a coffee substitute, it’s Regency Instant Mashed Potatoes. Except they drank it. Ick.
Here’s an interesting comment found in a recipe for Acorn Coffee:
Since the duty was taken off, West India coffee is so cheap that the substitutes are not worth making.
And then there’s this from a section titled For Improving Coffee:
To an ounce of coffee add a common teaspoonful of the best flour of mustard seed, previous to the boiling. To those unacquainted with the method, it is inconceivable how much it improves the fragancy [sic], fineness, transparency, and gratefully quick flavor of the beverage, and probably too it adds to its wholesomeness.
Also this, which I actually find rather interesting:
Let one ounce of fresh ground coffee be put into a clean coffee-pot, or other proper vessel well tinned; pour a pint and a quarter of boiling water upon it, set it on the fire, let it boil thoroughly, afterwards put by to settle; this should be done on the preceding night, and on the following morning pour off the clear liquid; add to it one pint of new milk; set it again over the fire, but do not let it boil. Sweetened to every person’s taste, coffee thus made is a most wholesome and agreeable breakfast, summer or winter, with toast, bread and butter, rusks, biscuits, &c.
I might try that one.
On Thanksgiving Eve, I will be making pies. I baked three pumpkins this weekend and have already made my special super duper to die for pumpkin bread (with and without cranberries). I’m making pumpkin pie and also coconut cream pie (by special request).
What are you making?
