The author was obviously in the pocket of the hog farmer's guild. "No, really, you NEED to use lard for this! Some other people use drippings, but it's not as good, trust us."
"Ok I'm gonna teach you how to do Hertfordshire cakes" "Wait you forgot to tell me the amounts" "I told you an egg or two, what more do you want? My job here is done"
I used to work on a shrimping boat down in southern Louisiana and I immediately thought..HE IS MAKING BEIGNETS!!!! Lol a touch of POWDERED sugar on top and he would have a nice batch on hand!
One year, when I was much younger, I was helping during 'sugaring time' for an elderly couple. The wife on the farm would treat us with various 'lard fried' goods on every hard won day.
if you deep fry canned biscuit dough it makes great donuts. The holes are always my favorite. My mom used to do that when i was a kid for my birthday. :)
I think sometimes you get so used to making something that its just intuition. You don't think about someone else making it, so don't take any detailed notes.
@@MetricJester Oh yeah, funnel cake is a BATTER. batter is less forgiving than dough, and when you're trying to pour it juuust right.. oh jeez and you have to have the oil temp just right too or it'll automatically cook into a pile of little nuggets
FASCINATING. Post-WWII, Good Housekeeping's newly-weds cookbook had a recipe that called for heating milk and pork lard and a bit of salt and sugar together as the basis for building up a standard white wheat flour yeast-risen bread. Our Mom taught my brother and me to make it. It was our standard family home loaf...until Wonderbread invaded the market and was cheaper to buy than to make bread at home. The same starting technique of milk, melted lard, and so on was a basis for New England's famous Parker House Rolls. The idea apparently has DEEP Colonial roots.
Oh Jon. As a Hertfordshire native born and bred, this was fascinating. Pronounced: "heart-ford-sheer" for your future reference. I'm going to try making these myself!
Mr. Townsend, I love your videos. You show us we don't have to be trained chefs to make these recipes, and that is very much appreciated. Thank you, kind sir, for making us feel comfortable in our own kitchens.
Pronunciation tip- it's a weird quirk of English English, but Hertfordshire is pronounced HARTfordshure. I don't know why, probably something to do with old English, we've got loads of places that aren't pronounced how you'd think they are.
A forgivable mispronunciation. I am often amused, in a kindly way, by Americans trying to pronounce Worcestershire Sauce, which is pronounced woostersheer.
Do you remember in the movie 'Wizard of Oz" when Auntie Em was handing out fresh made crullers to the farmhands? Looks like this was a long time tradition, huh? 👍
I've always liked recipes where the process is more important than the ingredient amounts. For example, if you take a standard biscuit recipe, and know what to do you can extrapolate that into everything from pancakes to muffins and many other things.
It was a form of gatekeeping though. Like magic. The first/easiest explanation for how a trick is done, is normally how it was actually done. If they revealed “their secrets” the show is over for every magician world wide. For bakers, if regular joe could make basic pastry in their own home? My baker goes broke
@@dylanzrim3635 not really though. People still buy crappy sandwiches that have sat in plastic for days from supermarkets because it's faster and easier than making their own. Despite it only taking a few minutes. Pastry takes time and only those who want to will make that time however universal the technical knowledge is. And most magicians' tricks are out there, people don't bother learning and many who do still like watching just to admire the skill and try to spot the trick. As with all things it comes down to the fact that people with experience will figure things out and be able to adapt in ways others cant.
@@MartinTheReader well said. Though I'd contend that people don't want ingredients/proccesses known not to keep everyone from using it but to decrease competitors. That's why most inventions, recipes, tricks, etc. that people and companies use are proprietary.
Some days this is how I make dinner. No recipe, just ‘what do I have and how much of it do I want?’ Most of the time it works out ok but in baking you can get some unexpected results until you get a sense of proportion. I imagine the women who cooked these spent a lot of time baking and had some intuition on a lot of it. To me, when they say like pie dough or “paste like” I imagine a dough that doesn’t hold together as much as yours did.
My thoughts, those are Schmalzkuchen. 😆 Yeast, Milk, Egg, Lard - only the allspice is not what we use today, but it does sound like an 1750-1800 version. It’s always fun to see how many cultures have a similar or even just the same recipe, like Schmalzkuchen, Beignets and Hertfordshire Cakes. 😄 Man, now I crave Schmalzkuchen. 🤤
These look very close to the little fried cakes I make, family recipe... I make mine savory not sweet, and no egg in the dough Otherwise, pretty much the same. Sprinkle with coarse salt at the end. Been making them for decades. They never last long, I barely have time to clean up the kitchen before they're gone. :) I usually let them puff up quite a bit - for that I rest the dough after I add the yeast, not fry them right away.
Love it! This reminds me of my Peace Corps days when I was trying to cook a variety of comfort foods with no recipes, a few very basic ingredients, a tabletop gas stove, and candlelight. I was already a practiced cook so I could muddle my way through with educated guesses about ingredients and amounts, and they usually ended up at least passable if not immensely satisfactory (but maybe that was just the comfort food deprivation talking).
@@psalm91rdwlkfpgrl There have been a few others that Jon "didn't particularly care for" as my dad used to say. That was his polite way of saying, "That stuff is terrible and I won't eat it on a bet."
They're like mini fried scones! Take out the spice, butter instead of lard, baking powder for yeast and you have my great grandmother's recipe for fried scones.
These kinda remind me of fry-bread, right done to the vagueness of how much of the ingredients. Pretty much the same key ingredients; fat, flour, yeast and water with something to sweeten it up just a little. The major difference being you don’t want to knead the doe too much. With fry-bread, you knead until it is no longer sticky.
If you rest your dough, even for an hour, it will relax and let you roll it more easily. I’m a chef and make pie dough for a living, I like to let my dough rest for a day or so, if I can. This is my favorite part of RU-vid. Especially as I renovate my 1755 New England home.
Been watching this channel so long that, when he reads from the old timey books, I don't skip a beat. Good stuff. Edit: Looks a lot like Newfoundland toutins.
I’m a high school social studies teacher and I love your channel. I use your videos a lot to give my students a good idea what life during the 17th and 18th centuries looked like. It’s really hard to find good quality videos on this subject. If I may make a suggestion for a future video, there are no good quality 10-15min videos overviewing the life of colonial Americans. At least that I can find. I know your entire channel covers this well but having a single overview video would be incredibly useful in a high school US History classroom.
You should do three recipes and don't us where they're from. Two of them are real 18th century recipes, and another one a modern invention. Audience has to guess based on the ingredients and process which one is the modern one 😉
I always love old doughnut recipes because they’re closer to the name. Originally they were all just equivalent to the doughnut holes. That’s why they’re doughnuts. They’re fried dough in the shape and size of a nut
Sohla El Walley (formerly of Bon Appetit) has a web series on History Channel’s YT where she tries the earliest written recipes of foods we have today. That’s also worth checking out if you like Townsends and Tasting History.
Reminds me on the following traditional German recipe: 500 g flour, 20 g fresh yeast, 1 egg, about 50 - 75 g sugar and more for sprinkling, about 200 - 250 ml milk, 50 g Butter, pinch of salt, as for spices whatever you got, cinnamon or cloves. Heap flour, make a well, into goes lukewarm milk, sugar, crumbled yeast, stir the yeast milk mix a bit, wait until it foams, add egg and salt, start kneading, add little milk or flour if needed, add soft butter in small batches, knead until the dough is smooth but not sticky wet. Form into a ball, let rest under a dampened towel until doubled in size. Roll out into a finger thick large rectangle ( 1-2 cm thickness). Cut diagonally into small rhombuses or rectangles, deep fry for 2 minutes, only a few at one time, traditionally in lard (or oil), stir with a slotted spoon to flip them over - until golden brown, remove and toss with sugar and spice of you choice, lots of cinnamon, less powdered cloves. You can add spice or leave it out or add spice to the dough. They only taste good eaten at the same day.
Reminds me of something that I was privy to eat as a child. We always called them fried sweet cakes or fried spice cakes. The one thing I do remember is that there was a significant rising time to let the yeast do it's job for both the fermented flavor and the extra added "puffiness" of the end product.
Looks good. Funny to see you sprinkle suger on them at the end and pretty much none of that suger sticked lol just fell to the bottom of the plate lol great video like always 👍🏻👍🏻
For some reason, this episode got me thinking you should try doing a video with Ruth Goodman. As a historian of all things domestic, she'd have a blast with these vague recipes.
I love the cooking you do, I wish I could smell them as you make them. Living in a cabin like yours making the food you make is a dream come true for me
Never thought I'd see my counties name on this channel. Hertfordshire is pronounce heartforshire over here. Not sure why, old English is funny sometimes.
The vowels used to sound different when they choose what letters to use to spell it. The pronunciation and spelling stays the same but the language changed.
It was the great vowel shift. It was almost certainly spelled more phonetically previously, but they changed the spelling while retaining pronunciations for a lot of words.
I love our old place names. There's Threekingham (pronounced Threkingum) or Osbournby (pronounced Ozzenby). Language evolving but place names staying the same, love it
This channel's cooking videos are amazing! This video inspired me to make Korean ramen with thin cuts of beef and clean up after myself while drunk! While my roommate earlier today made ready-made Pillsbury cookies and left a giant mess of dirty pans and utensils and wrappers. The rush of inspiration is fantastic! Keep on doing what you're doing Townsends!
These look so easy and worth trying. The only question I have is about the lack of salt. You didn't seem to miss it but I think I would add a good pinch of salt to richen up the overall flavor.
This reminds me of a very primitive version of a Crullers recipe I have from a local museum cookbook. Baking soda was in use by that time, and Nutmeg was used instead of Allspice, but otherwise, very similar. Another great video guys!
This seems to be just a hot water pastry but with milk instead of water, which is why the recipe said "just like a pie crust" hot water pie crusts are still used for pies in the UK.
In Denmark er have a special Christmas cake, called " klejner" witch is kinda similary cooked in pig fat... It's sweet and look a little alike, though it's turned inside itself and out
Looks very good. This is a rather old dessert, still very popular in our alpine region, "Schmoizboachas", i.e. lard-baken, yeast dough pieces, cooked swimming in hot lard. The shape varies locally, some are called "Nussn", nuts, some " Nudeln", noodles, not meaning pasta. They usually were served to the farmservants on certain religious occasions as Thanksgiving for example. They were the dessert after a "eat as much you can" dinner. Today these Cakes are served in many little alm inns for hikers. But I never found a precise recipe, it`s all left to the skill of the cook, and I think, you did very well!
Lol. From watching this channel I've learned that everything back then either tasted like Thanksgiving, Christmas, ham, was bland, smelled/tasted like smoke, or tasted like literal ash from a fire. If you were lucky there may have been other flavors 💖
