A-Z of unusual ingredients: verjus – Telegraph

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This week, V is for verjus: a sour medieval staple that is suddenly having a revival. 

It’s commonplace for recipes to come and go in the cycle of food fashions. But for a stock ingredient to disappear from recipe books, only to be resurrected centuries later, is almost unprecedented.

This is what has happened to verjus. The acidic juice made from pressing unripe grapes or crab apples was something of a storecupboard staple in medieval kitchens. …

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The birth of “The Classic Italian Cook Book” by Marcella Hazan

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My name is Peter Mollman, (the proprietor of this blog) and I was the editor and publisher of this landmark of the culinary world. Here is how it came into being.

 

… The rest was easy. I visited Marcella at her home several more times, took a class (I still have the typed recipe for scallopine di vitello al Marsala), talked with Victor, a Harvard graduate (as was my son, so we had something else in common) and we agreed to move forward.

Within a month or so of our meeting, we had a contract. …

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Manuscript Cookbooks as Autobiography: A Glimpse at the Life of Emma Blomfield Schreiber

Emma Blomfield Schreiber was christened at the Anglican Church in Bradwell-near-the-sea on September 19, 1834. … Emma collected recipes for desserts, made dishes, beverages, remedies, cleaning solutions, and preserves. The careful record of the source for many recipes preserves her network of female friends and relatives. A recipe for plum pudding dated December 1887 suggests Emma (or someone else) used, added to, and revised her recipe book for at least thirty years.

Rachel A. Snell, “Manuscript Cookbooks as Autobiography: A Glimpse at the Life of Emma Blomfield Schreiber,” Khronikos: the University of Maine graduate history student blog (blog), December 4, 2013.

 

 
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Cranberry kuchen (cake) recept

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Traditional recipes for kuchen exhibit a splendid disregard for calories and cholesterol. A single cake might contain eight or ten egg yolks and a pound of butter. A memorable recipe in a wonderful old cookery book of my mother called for sixteen egg yolks—a recipe for a heart attack, but surely a good way to go. This recipe is substantially more heart-healthy. 

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