Chocolate cookies!
Ok, I'll admit it, I'm a chocoholic.
In everyday 21st century life, this is not a problem. You can get chocolate in pretty much any form you can imagine, whenever you want. It is problematic, however, when you are doing your best to approximate a mid 18th century diet.
In a few weeks it will have been a year since I started my experimental diet of "period food" only. (only applies at home, eating out while traveling doesn't count) For the first year, I ignored the seasons and allowed myself the raw materials year-round. Historically, there wouldn't be all things available at all times. Now it is January, there wouldn't be any fresh vegetables available, nor eggs. I'd be living on dried stuff, root veggies and stuff that keeps well, like cabbage, fresh or salted meat, dried grains etc.
For the first year, I cheated and allowed myself such luxuries year-round as frozen berries and fresh veggies from the supermarket. The long and short of it is that I've left out white flour, white sugar all additives and preservatives. This means no chocolate treats with their trans-fats, corn syrup and chemical preservatives. I've gone nearly a year without a Ring-Ding.
I've lost around 35 pounds. My clothes don't fit right anymore. I need a belt to hold my pants up, and even then gotta keep hitchin' them up.
In the old days, chocolate was an expensive luxury. Not for everyday eating. Most of the time it was reserved to either flavor things like cakes or for drinking in the form of hot chocolate. The French and Indian raiding party that came to attack Township #4 in 1747 was issued chocolate: if I recall, the leader of the expedition got a pound.
If he could have chocolate, then I should be able to as well! Some French packs were captured after an ambush in the swamp off of Lower Landing Road here in town in 1746, near the site of where Captain Stevens built his blockhouse. They were sold at public auction. I'll stretch my imagination and pretend that I, as a lawful citizen of Township #4, bought a pack at auction and it happened to contain a precious pound of chocolate!
Fanciful or not, it is the justification that I used to go and buy a pound of unsweetened baking chocolate in the store. Then the experiments began... I tried to just nibble on a chunk. That's when I learned just how nasty unsweetened chocolate is; it is no Hershey Bar. So I melted some and tried to sweeten it with maple sugar: no dice. Then I tried to add muscovado sugar in some quantity. Eventually it became palatable, but it never "set up" right, so I spread it on a cookie sheet and put it in the freezer. Eventually it firmed up enough to eat. There had to be a better way!
I started looking through reprints of period cookbooks, someone had to give me a hint of how to get my chocolate fix... Then I came up with an idea: COOKIES! They weren't called cookies then, they were cakes. The vernacular of junk food gets a little fuzzy. All of the recipes called for massive quantities of ingredients meant to maximize the heat from firing the oven and entertaining large crowds. I needed them just for me.
What I ended up doing is going to an antique cookbook (not colonial era, 1920's) and using their ratios, but substituting my all-natural ingredients. For instance, in stead of a cup of white sugar (well, it is presumed white, they didn't specify) I used muscovado. I was able to use the egg it called for because one of the girls actually left one in a nest box for us last week. Ten minutes in the oven, and I miraculously produced two dozen all natural chocolate cookies made with ingredients that fit within my 1750's diet! I say miraculously because I was on the phone with a customer at the time...at 11:30PM on a saturady night.
What a rare treat. If I can muster up the self control, I'll allow myself one a day to make them last longer. As I sit down here at my desk and type this, it is hard to fight the urge to go attack them, cookie-monster style. I can't though, I have to make my precious chocolate last until the next hapless Frenchman flees the scene without his pack...
In all seriousness, a big part of the success of this diet has been earning my food. For instance, I get to eat apples today because we picked, peeled, cored, sliced and dried a couple of bushels of them in the fall for the winter supply. It took a week with them hanging on strings from hooks in the ceiling to get them dry enough to store long-term. Since I only have a finite amount, and so much effort went into them, I am far less likely to just gobble them up. Instead I savor each dried, leathery apple ring. What I think I will do to "earn" the next package of chocolate is to try and shoot a coyote. Then I will have a hide to theoretically trade off down at Phineas Stevens' truck house for a block of the precious stuff from South America. No coyote = no chocolate. Fair enough.
Once my cookies are gone, it's back to the old daily diet of meat, dried stuff and cornmeal hoecakes. Not that I'm complaining, I am really enjoying that stuff, it's just that sometimes you just gotta have something chocolate.
In everyday 21st century life, this is not a problem. You can get chocolate in pretty much any form you can imagine, whenever you want. It is problematic, however, when you are doing your best to approximate a mid 18th century diet.
In a few weeks it will have been a year since I started my experimental diet of "period food" only. (only applies at home, eating out while traveling doesn't count) For the first year, I ignored the seasons and allowed myself the raw materials year-round. Historically, there wouldn't be all things available at all times. Now it is January, there wouldn't be any fresh vegetables available, nor eggs. I'd be living on dried stuff, root veggies and stuff that keeps well, like cabbage, fresh or salted meat, dried grains etc.
For the first year, I cheated and allowed myself such luxuries year-round as frozen berries and fresh veggies from the supermarket. The long and short of it is that I've left out white flour, white sugar all additives and preservatives. This means no chocolate treats with their trans-fats, corn syrup and chemical preservatives. I've gone nearly a year without a Ring-Ding.
I've lost around 35 pounds. My clothes don't fit right anymore. I need a belt to hold my pants up, and even then gotta keep hitchin' them up.
In the old days, chocolate was an expensive luxury. Not for everyday eating. Most of the time it was reserved to either flavor things like cakes or for drinking in the form of hot chocolate. The French and Indian raiding party that came to attack Township #4 in 1747 was issued chocolate: if I recall, the leader of the expedition got a pound.
If he could have chocolate, then I should be able to as well! Some French packs were captured after an ambush in the swamp off of Lower Landing Road here in town in 1746, near the site of where Captain Stevens built his blockhouse. They were sold at public auction. I'll stretch my imagination and pretend that I, as a lawful citizen of Township #4, bought a pack at auction and it happened to contain a precious pound of chocolate!
Fanciful or not, it is the justification that I used to go and buy a pound of unsweetened baking chocolate in the store. Then the experiments began... I tried to just nibble on a chunk. That's when I learned just how nasty unsweetened chocolate is; it is no Hershey Bar. So I melted some and tried to sweeten it with maple sugar: no dice. Then I tried to add muscovado sugar in some quantity. Eventually it became palatable, but it never "set up" right, so I spread it on a cookie sheet and put it in the freezer. Eventually it firmed up enough to eat. There had to be a better way!
I started looking through reprints of period cookbooks, someone had to give me a hint of how to get my chocolate fix... Then I came up with an idea: COOKIES! They weren't called cookies then, they were cakes. The vernacular of junk food gets a little fuzzy. All of the recipes called for massive quantities of ingredients meant to maximize the heat from firing the oven and entertaining large crowds. I needed them just for me.
What I ended up doing is going to an antique cookbook (not colonial era, 1920's) and using their ratios, but substituting my all-natural ingredients. For instance, in stead of a cup of white sugar (well, it is presumed white, they didn't specify) I used muscovado. I was able to use the egg it called for because one of the girls actually left one in a nest box for us last week. Ten minutes in the oven, and I miraculously produced two dozen all natural chocolate cookies made with ingredients that fit within my 1750's diet! I say miraculously because I was on the phone with a customer at the time...at 11:30PM on a saturady night.
What a rare treat. If I can muster up the self control, I'll allow myself one a day to make them last longer. As I sit down here at my desk and type this, it is hard to fight the urge to go attack them, cookie-monster style. I can't though, I have to make my precious chocolate last until the next hapless Frenchman flees the scene without his pack...
In all seriousness, a big part of the success of this diet has been earning my food. For instance, I get to eat apples today because we picked, peeled, cored, sliced and dried a couple of bushels of them in the fall for the winter supply. It took a week with them hanging on strings from hooks in the ceiling to get them dry enough to store long-term. Since I only have a finite amount, and so much effort went into them, I am far less likely to just gobble them up. Instead I savor each dried, leathery apple ring. What I think I will do to "earn" the next package of chocolate is to try and shoot a coyote. Then I will have a hide to theoretically trade off down at Phineas Stevens' truck house for a block of the precious stuff from South America. No coyote = no chocolate. Fair enough.
Once my cookies are gone, it's back to the old daily diet of meat, dried stuff and cornmeal hoecakes. Not that I'm complaining, I am really enjoying that stuff, it's just that sometimes you just gotta have something chocolate.
posted by MVTCoPete | 11:44 PM
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