American Election Cakes

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Election Cakes, which appeared in the first cookbook by an American (Amelia Simmons) were labeled “old fashioned” in 1830 Child’s The Frugal Housewife and by 1850 (in Beecher), they were at least ‘”100 years old.” New England sites appeared in several titles such as Old Hartford Election Cake, Connecticut Election Cake and even one Salem Election Cake [in Buckeye Cookery with Old Hartford Election Cake]. Other authors who included Election Cakes ranged from Eliza Leslie, 1840, Esther Howland, 1845, F.I. Gillette, 1887 and Fannie Farmer, 1896.

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A Mini Timeline of Ancient Foods

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DATELINE: 21K BCE………………………….SUBJECT: When did man first start grinding grains into cereal?

Old thinking was 10K BCE, but archaeologists at hunter-gatherer site Ohalo II in Israel turned up cereal grindings–mostly grass seeds including wild barley and emmer wheat–and burned stones that indicate these early peoples were making and baking bread long before they learned how to cultivate cereal grasses on their own. (Nature, reported in The Economist, 8/7/04) …

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How to Hang a Pheasant

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Off to the library. I took a systematic look at the science of hanging game birds. One of my idiosyncrasies (I have many) is that I collect game cookery books. I have many, and several discuss hanging game birds. The great Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin doesn’t give a timetable, but says, …

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A Brief History of Bread

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Bread started out as porridge – cooked grain pastes. Prehistoric peoples were grinding grain; a millstone thought to be 7,500 years old has been discovered. Two important discoveries led the way to bread (not to mention noodles and pastries). The first was turning those simple pastes into flatbreads by cooking on a hot stone. The second was natural fermentation of the grain paste by wild yeast spores.

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