Dyeing Easter eggs naturally is really easy and so much fun! 😀
Each Easter we dye Easter eggs with natural dyes. Over the years we’ve tried different vegetable dye materials: vegetables, herbs, teas etc. Onion skins and red cabbage produced the most vibrant colors. But this Easter I also wanted naturally dyed green, pink and yellow Easter eggs! 😀 Continue reading 19 Ways How To Dye Easter Eggs Naturally
Today I have more fun with homemade natural blue food coloring for you: All-natural blue pasta! 😀 Continue reading Homemade All-Natural Blue Pasta
This tasty vegetable soup recipe was published in the 1914 cookbook ‘Meatless Cookery‘. Continue reading Quick And Easy Vegetarian Vegetable Soup – Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #22
You don’t need commercial yeast to make a delicious loaf of bread! Bake homemade bread with wild yeast from scratch. I’ll show you two alternatives to make wild yeast starter from scratch at home with fermented honey water or fruit yeast water. Bread with wild yeast starter is easy and cheap to make and so delicious – it tastes just like ordinary yeast bread or even better!
Wild yeast bread is made by spontaneous fermentation involving wild yeasts and lactobacilli. Honey and fruit water is used to catch wild yeasts and lactobacilli which naturally leaven the bread. Wild yeast bread with fermented honey water or fruit yeast water has hardly any taste at all – a sweet and mild taste – like store-bought white bread. So start a fun kitchen science project today and bake bread with wild yeast from scratch! Continue reading Bread Recipe With Wild Yeast – With Honey Water Or Fruit Yeast
In the Victorian era, yeast was sometimes made at home. The last days I tried out another Victorian yeast substitute recipe. The other Victorian yeast substitute was made with fresh hops, this homemade yeast just needs flour, sugar and water. I made two different yeast starter: one with white flour, and one with whole wheat flour Continue reading Victorian Yeast Substitute
I tried to make Victorian hops bread – it’s a bread recipe without commercial yeast: you’ll just need hops, potatoes, sugar, flour and water. Continue reading Victorian Hops Bread Without Commercial Yeast
For the Historical Food Fortnightly challenge 18 – ‘Let’s get saucy!’ I tried to make a medieval natural blue sauce. I found the recipe in different languages all over the internet: in French it’s called ‘Sauce bleu céleste d’été’, and in English ‘Heavenly sky-blue summer sauce’ or ‘Summertime cerulean blue sauce‘. It’s a 1450s or 1460s recipe from the book ‘Libro de arte coquinaria’ by Maestro Martino, which is the most influential cookbook in the 15th century. The cookbook contains mainly sauce recipes, and it’s the first book which mentions a piece of cloth to strain sauces. The cookbook is written in Latin and the recipe I’m now making is called: ‘Sapor celeste de estate’. Continue reading Heavenly Sky-blue (Or Blood-red) Summer Sauce – Historical Food Fortnightly
Damper is an unleavened flat bread made with flour and water, which is baked in the hot ashes of a wood fire. Australian damper is called bannock or ash cake in the USA. Damper is easy to make as part of a cowboy or lumberjack breakfast.
Bacon & eggs, Victorian damper with black tea, all cooked over an open fire, is my entry for challenge 8 – Literary Foods – of the Historical Food Fortnightly. Continue reading Victorian Campfire Damper Recipe – Historical Food Fortnightly
You can easily make your own white flour and wheat bran at home by sifting home milled wheat grains. Continue reading How To Make Bran And White Flour At Home
Hardtack, also called ship’s biscuit, is a hard cracker made with flour and water. It was used on long sea voyages, and soldiers in the American Civil War were sometimes supplied with hardtack rations instead of flour. But hardtack is also an early form of dog food: ‘Dog-biscuit is a hard and well-baked mass of coarse, yet clean and wholesome flour, of an inferior kind to that known as sailors’ biscuit; and this latter substance, indeed, would be the best substitute’ (The Quarterly Journal of Agriculture, 1841, p. 244).
Hardtack will keep much longer than flour (in museums there’s still hardtack which is over hundred years old! 😮 )- so it’s my entry for the Historical Food Fortnightly challenge 12 (food preservation). Continue reading Hardtack As Dog Food – Historical Food Fortnightly