Smithsonian Libraries

Cooking from the Collections: More sweet treats!

Welcome to Part II of December's Cooking from the Collections feature! This month, our intrepid recipe testers tried their hand at old fashioned sweets.  The treats included Martha Washington’s recipe for sugar cookies, a boozy 1950’s  rum pudding, and a gingerbread cookie that might have been a favorite of James Smithson.  Who do you think would win a holiday bake-off? The founder of the Smithsonian, our very first First Lady or an aspiring June Cleaver?  Today we present the remaining two recipes. Click over to Friday's post to learn more about James Smithson's gingerbread.

All three desserts ready for sampling.

 

Martha Washington’s Sugar Cookies

Before there was Martha Stewart in the kitchen, there was Martha Washington. Thanks to a transcription by Karen Hess of Martha Washington’s Booke of cookery, anyone can whip up the the original First Family’s favorite treats for the holidays.  Not only does Hess dutifully transcribe Martha Washington’s personal cookbook, she also translates ingredients and cooking methods for modern times.  These basic cookies (callled "cakes" by Martha) were really rather plain, but could easily be spruced up with vanilla or lemon zest or festive royal icing.  If nothing else, they’ll make an excellent conversation starter. Do you think George was a fan of sweets? That might explain the teeth.

 

 

Adapted from Martha Washington’s Booke of cookery, transcribed by Karen Hess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Makes about 30 cookies.

Ingredients:

•  3 cups of unbleached pastry flour
• ½ cup of raw granulated sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 4 tablespoons heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons rose water
• 10 tablespoons butter, cold and cut in to small pieces

 Directions:

1. Preheat an oven to 375 degrees. Line 2-3 large cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. Sift together flour and sugar in large bowl.
3. Stir in egg, cream and rose water.
4. Transfer mixture to food processor  and add butter pieces. Pulse just until the mixture forms a solid dough.
5. Allow the dough to rest.  The directions are a bit fuzzy on this. I put mine in the fridge, so that it would be easy to roll out, for about 15 minutes.
6. Roll the dough out (I worked in sections and kept the unused part in the fridge) and cut in to shapes. Use a water glass if you’re going for authenticity!
7. Space the cookies about an inch apart on the pans and bake, about 8-10 minutes, rotating the pans half way through. Remove to wire racks for cooling.

— Erin Rushing

 

Swedish Rum Pudding

This recipe is from Elegant Desserts , published by Culinary Arts Institute, the same folks that brought us The Casserole Cookbook, previously discussed here. Of course I wanted to serve it with lingonberries they are Scandinavian and besides it would also mean a trip to IKEA and it doesn’t get more Swedish than that.  Overall, this dish did turn out. To some the rum maybe overpowering but it had just enough. 

 

 

Adapted from the Elegant Dessert pamphlet published by the Culinary Arts Institute 1955.

Ingredients:

• ¼ cup of cold water
• 2 teaspoons of unflavored gelatin
• 4 egg yokes
• 2 cups of heavy cream (I used whipping cream)
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ teaspoon of salt
• 3 tablespoons rum
• lingonberry or raspberry sauce

Directions:

1. Set out six custard cups
2. Pour water into small cup and sprinkle evenly with gelatin. Let gelatin stand about 5 minutes to stoften
3. Meanwhile blend well in the top of a double boiler the egg yolks, cream, sugar and salt. Cook over simmering water, stirring constantly and quickly, until egg yolk mixture coats a silver spoon (Here I used an everyday flatware spoon)
4. Remove from heat and strain into a bowl. Immediately stir in gelatin. Stir until gelatin is completely dissolved. Set aside to cool stirring occasionally. Add in the rum and stir until thoroughly blended. Pour mixture into the custard cups and set in the refrigerator to chill (about 2 hours).
5. When ready to serve, unmold desserts by carefully running a knife around inside edges of cups; invert onto serving dishes.
6. Serve with lingonberries or Raspberry Sauce.

— Ninette Dean

A Winter Vacation of the Past

This past summer, we featured travel and vacation related items, including ones about express steamers, a beach hotel, and a lake resort.  Each month this winter, we will do the same.  But this time we will feature winter vacation related items.  This month, we are featuring a 1906 brochure about The Court Inn.

 

Court Inn, Camden, SC.  Brochure, 1906, The Court Inn.

 

The Court Inn was a winter resort located in Camden, South Carolina.  The resort, which accommodated about 200 guests, opened each year on Thanksgiving Day.  The 1906 Brochure described the resort as having "every modern comfort and convenience, including electric lights, steam heat and open fireplaces, call bells, and bath-rooms, both public and private."

The resort had a lot of outdoor activities for guests to enjoy.  In front of the hotel, there was a garden with flowers and shrubs.  A five hundred foot long arched evergreen walkway and the Grove of Towering Pines was also located on the grounds.  Other outdoor activities included fishing and boating at a nearby lake, playing polo, and playing golf at the nearby Sarsfield Golf Club.

This 1906 Brochure about The Court Inn can be found in the Trade Literature Collection at the National Museum of American History Library.  Take a look at the Galaxy of Images to see more pages from this brochure.

Check back in January and February to read about other winter vacation resorts of the past!

-Alexia MacClain

The handwriting of Galileo

Would you like to see Galileo’s hand-writing?—I asked a visiting friend who came to see highlights of the Dibner Library in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries the other day. In the age of mobile devices, email messages, texting and the many other forms of digital communication are we still interested in the way someone writes by hand? Does that provide any other kind of information besides the text?

 

 

These questions came to me much later because my friend very quickly answered “yes” to my first question. So, I headed to the temperature and humidity controlled secure stacks to the manuscript section, where the library holds the ca. 1600 manuscript groups that were donated to the Smithsonian by Bern Dibner, 20^th century engineer, inventor and science historian, in 1976. I carefully removed the folder that contains the letter from the archival storage box and took it to the reading room where my friend was sitting. I told him about the content of the letter and its story which is interesting.

Galileo wrote this letter on May 12^th, 1635 (in Italian) replying to his colleague and supporter, the French amateur mathematician and natural philosopher, Nicolaus Claude Fabri de Preiresc. Their correspondence had started years earlier mainly about Preiresc’s repeated appeals to Cardinal Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) to lighten the restrictions of Galileo’s house arrest he was under due to his sentence at his 1633 trial. The letters (as this particular one too) discussed scientific topics as well, among them a curious water clock developed by Franciscus Linus in Liège.  The clock consisted of a small globe balancing and rotating in water contained in a larger round vessel. Next to the globe was a small fish hovering in the water and pointing to the numbers on the small globe showing the hour of the day. According to the letter, the clock was driven by a mysterious magnetic force. Galileo used the occasion of discussing Linus’s water clock to describe his own similar model that he developed some years earlier. Then he quickly added: “I, meanwhile, have wished to indicate […] that I have not usurped the invention from Father Linus—if indeed his machine does not have any more to it than mine.”

 

 

“Beautiful, even hand-writing”—said my friend looking at the letter—“It does not bespeak about a crushed, oppressed old man’s state of mind.” And this should remind us that, in fact, Galileo did not suffer in the casemates of the Inquisition, since he revoked some of his scientific ideas. This made it possible for him to have a prolific time during his years following the trial and publish one of his most significant works, the Discourses concerning two new sciences. The book, published in Leyden in 1638, is considered by many Galileo’s main contribution to physics, in which he laid down the foundations of the modern science of dynamics.

—Lilla Vekerdy

Digitization Dispatch: Etymology Edition!

According to a 1918 publication from silk manufacturers The Cheney Brothers, 'polka dots' are so called for a couple of reasons. First, a traveling dance instructor spotted a young woman performing an unfamiliar dance on the border of Poland and Bohemia. The dance instructor became enamoured with the exuberant half steps of the dance and began teaching it to students. He named the dance after the anonymous performer, the feminine form designating Polish citizenry: the Polka. At the same time, the presidential campaign of James Polk was underway. And as the dance spread around the globe, trade manufactures were eager to cash in on on the popularity of both the incoming US President and the dance. Early issues of catalogs begin to describe their wares as "polka gauze", "polka hats", and "polka shoes".

This month's digital collection highlight, Why do you call them Polka Dots?, neglects the origins of latter half of the phrase, but it could be that the word 'dot' (rather than "spot", say) comes into play because Morse's new communication language was utmost in the mind of the populace. Dots and dashes were on the tip of the collective tongue at the time. And whether or not the Cheney Brothers eytomological report is technically speaking the most accurate tracing of the term, the story highlights the ways consumer culture can creep into language. Enjoy!

How to dance the Polka

Cheney Brothers Silk