18th century

  • Carrot pudding

    This summer we’re trying out a CSA, or “Community Supported Agriculture.” Each week we pick up a manageable amount of fresh vegetables (and sometimes a potted plant!) from a nearby farm. Having paid the farm in advance for the season, we… Continue reading

    Carrot pudding

  • Colonial Craft: Pomanders

    Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and that you’re settling into 2014. I spent Christmas with my family in Ohio, listening to my dad’s beloved Ray Conniff Singers and cooking up a storm. We spent… Continue reading

  • Apple pie

    Sometimes you get old recipes right the first time: you decipher the flowery language, you make the right substitutions, you determine the correct proportions. And sometimes, well, you don’t. This is a story of when I got it wrong. We… Continue reading

  • Colonial Cookbook: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

    Meet Mrs. Hannah Glasse. By day, she is a plain English housewife, struggling to scrape by in the mid-1700s. By night, however, she works on her revolutionary new idea: a cookbook designed for the masses of untrained servants working in… Continue reading

  • Spiced, stewed pears

    Thank you for all your wonderful comments on our news! It can be scary to put big announcements out into this void of the internet, so it meant a lot to read your good wishes. We’re knee-deep in fall over… Continue reading

  • How to render suet for cooking

    Back when I first started this blog, I learned a few things right away about historical cooking. First, some old recipes are very similar to their modern counterparts (like pie). Second, animal fat is wonderful. From salt pork to lard,… Continue reading

  • Boiled ham (or, a foray into Eastern Europe)

    Sometimes I think way too hard about how to use up leftovers. The potential for waste bothers me. If we have half a head of red cabbage sitting in the crisper because Josh realized he really, really hates cabbage after… Continue reading