Brandy Cocktail

Early 20th century cocktails are quite often based on brandy, viciously alcoholic and pretty straight-forward. This one, made from a recipe from 1913 for "Brandy Cocktail" found in a book called "Bartenders' Manual" published by the American Bartenders' Association, is pretty typical.

The recipe calls for gum syrup; i.e. syrup with gum arabic. It's a must when making old fashioned cocktails because it adds a silky texture you won't get from ordinary syrup, and it softens the flavour of the raw alcohol (which, let's face it, old fashioned cocktails mostly consist of). It's especially good with darker spirits like whisky or brandy. Monin, among others, still makes it, but you can also make it yourself.

3 dashes of gum syrup 

3 dashes Angostura

2 dashes Curaçao

1 wineglass of brandy

1/2 glass of fine ice

Stir well and strain into a cocktail glass (or whatever kind of glass you prefer).

Dizzyingly potent, but astonishingly good, and deceptively easy to drink.

Graham Pudding

We start, naturally, with Graham Pudding. The recipe I went with is from a 1914 cookbook called Things Mother Used to Make, by Lydia Maria Gurney. 

California Digital Library, Internet Book Archive

As written: 

Graham Pudding

Ingredients

1 1/2 cupfuls of graham flour

1/2 cupful of molasses

1/2 cupful of milk

1/4 cupful of butter

1 egg

1 teaspoon of soda

1/2 cupful of raisins and currants, mixed

salt and spice to taste

Instructions

Stir the soda into the molasses, then add the beaten egg and milk, salt and spice, and melted butter.

Add the flour and, last of all, currants and raisins, which have been sprinkled with flour.

Steam two hours in a tin pail set in a kettle of water and serve hot with sauce.

Sauce, for Graham Pudding

Ingredients

1 cupful of sugar

1/2 cupful of butter

1 egg

1 lemon

1/2 pint boiling water

Instructions

Cream together the butter and sugar.

Add the well-beaten yolk of egg.

Pour over this the boiling water, juice of lemon and well-beaten white of egg.

*

Most recipes out there agree on the basics of the pudding; the recommended sauces vary, with many including sherry and/or wine, which is probably also delicious. 

The key, eponymous ingredient of the Graham Pudding is graham flour. I confess I had never heard of this, but my local, small grocery store had it in the Various Flours section so perhaps it's not as uncommon as I assumed. 

Graham Flour 

(all photos by Anna)

Graham flour was the brainchild of Reverend Sylvester Graham, an early nineteenth century minister dedicated to diet reform, especially whole grains, vegetarianism, and bland food (the Graham Pudding would no doubt horrify him!). It's essentially a kind of coarse whole wheat flour, with the wheat kernel components ground separately then mixed. Now that I have a bunch of it, I shall also have to try out a recipe for graham bread, another of its staples--stay tuned!

But back to the pudding! The mixing of the ingredients, of course, is pretty simple. I used only raisins, rather than the mix of raisins and currants dictated, but I did sprinkle them with flour. For spice "to taste" I added pinches of allspice, cloves, and nutmeg. 

The batter prepared

To steam the pudding, the recipe instructs "two hours in a tin pail set in a kettle of water." Now, I don't have a tin pail nor any kind of water kettle that could be used in this way, so I cheated a little and searched for modern instructions on how to steam a pudding. Figuring Brits would know how to do this, I went with this guide from the BBC. 

The gist of it is: 

Put pudding batter into small metal bowl (I did not have one, so I took the handle off a small saucepan, which worked fine). 

Take pieces of alumninum foil and buttered wax/parchment paper about the same size, crease, and place over the bowl, with the foil on top. Tie the foil around the bowl with string (I had no string so used several strings of thread and a big rubber band, which I do not recommend--use string!). Tuck the paper in and fold the foil tightly around it. 

Take another piece of string and thread it through the string tied around both sides of the bowl, to make a handle. 

Readying the pudding for steaming--with handle, but before tucking paper edges in

Bring water to boil in a large saucepan (big enough to easily hold the bowl o'pudding). Most guides recommended putting a small saucer or trivet in the bottom for the bowl to rest on, but I didn't, which worked fine. When the bowl is put in the boiling water, the water level should reach about halfway up its sides; as it boils off, add water accordingly. 

Steam for length of time recipe indicates. To test for doneness, stab a knife (or kebab stick, as I did) into the pudding; it should emerge dry. 

--

I steamed my graham pudding like this for two hours, as the recipe stated, but found it needed another 45 minutes or so, for about 2 h 45 minutes total. 

Once the pudding is done, invert it onto a plate. It is less than beautiful, but such is the lot of the pudding. 

Newly steamed graham pudding

The sauce should be made in the meantime. I made it exactly as written, including the important detail of seperating the egg and adding the yolk and whites separately. This allows the egg white to foam up nicely. 

The sauce

Since my pudding needed extra time to steam, I put my finished sauce in the fridge in the meantime and gave it another mix when the pudding was ready. Sadly this destroyed the foam, but not the taste. The sauce, quite simply, tastes amazing. 

The pudding part on its own is certainly not untasty--a bit like a sweet molasses loaf. 

Pudding, interior view

But when you pour the sauce over it--and there is a lot of sauce, so you are required to be generous with it--and it soaks it up...! 

Pudding is served!

It may not ooze aesthetic appeal, but at first bite it's sure apparent why American ex-pats in London would miss it! 

What is less apparent, however, is why on earth we stopped making this. It's simple (the steaming technique is perhaps unfamiliar to many North Americans these days, but it's not difficult), no unhealthier than any indulgent dessert, and delicious. Whoever killed it was a cold, cold person. Let us encourage its resurrection! 

Introduction: Of Graham Puddings

This blog starts with a Graham pudding. Not one any of us consumed; like most of you readers, we had spent our lives unaware of its existence.

The Criterion Restaurant, London, 1902

via Wikimedia Commons

Rather, this Graham pudding was eaten by a Nathaniel Newham-Davis, at the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly, London, around 1914, and mentioned in his The Gourmet's Guide to London. Graham puddings, he implied, were a typically American dessert, and their presence at the Criterion was dear to homesick American ex-pats.

The founders of this blog write historical fiction, and these kinds of references to assumed knowledge always get the attention of an astute historical novelist. So this "Graham pudding" was a big American dessert in 1914? Certainly good to know.

Of course it's difficult to leave there, whatever the demands of the fiction at hand. If this was such a big dessert in 1914, why have no Americans today heard of it? When did it stop being big?

A search of newspapers (on newspapers.com) gives over 1200 references to "graham pudding" in newspapers across the United States and Canada, mostly recipes and/or menus. There are some references from the late 19th century, then a rise around 1905, carrying through until the mid 1930s, when references plummet, then trickle out through the 50s and 60s before vanishing. Recipes for Graham pudding are also a mainstay in cookbooks through the ca.1890-1930 period, then disappear.

So this was indeed a widely popular American (and Canadian) dessert. Then it stopped being. The reason is a mystery.

The mystery deepens when one looks at recipes for Graham pudding. Though specifics vary, it is a pudding in the British sense, with a cakey-loafy core containing molasses, raisins, graham flour, spices, and other baking ingredients, steamed, then served with a sauce (which varies even more, but as a rule is rich and sweet). Far from the many toe-curling old recipes out there, the Graham pudding sounds delicious.

via Internet Book Archive, Flickr Commons

Curiosity quickly turned to determination. We tried out the recipe. It was delicious. (The specifics shall be this blog's first proper post--stay tuned!). So the question remains: why did we kill this?

From this beginning we decided it was high time to revisit some of the recipes of the early twentieth century. There are plenty of posts out there attempting to recreate awful-sound recipes from the mid-twentieth century; we aren't in search of the awful. Per se. We are indeed intrigued by the fact that people eagerly ate and concocted dishes that do sometimes include combinations that appear to jar to modern tastes, or those that just sound random. We are, however, equally intrigued by the Graham puddings of the past--the dishes that sound delicious, but that we simply stopped making. We're also fascinated by the more everyday dishes that were once widespread, and eventually weren't. What did these things taste like? Did we kill them for good reason, or should we try and bring them back to life?


So the project is to pick out recipes that are interesting for these reasons (often with context, as we are history types), cook them, share the process, and, when the situation calls for it, encourage their reincarnation. And have a pretty swell time along the way!