Baking in the "Good Old Days"

[SylviaLovegren]

Small cakes and pastries could be baked on a flat griddle on inside a Dutch oven. It's easy to bake round cakes, cornbread, loaf bread in a spider (Dutch oven w short legs) with coals piled atop the lid and beneath it. Have baked Tartine style sourdough in an open hearth this was with great results. Such pots have been in use for centuries.

There are many functioning historical kitchens in the Toronto area and I have participated in making griddle breads on a swinging metal plate in an open hearth and baking a pie in a built in wall oven heated by the fireplace.

[djyee100]

I have only seen the oven over or next to the fireplace in later-era colonial estates who employed a large number of servants, just like the one shown. Read House, in your link, was built in 1801. (I have visited it.) That's a LONG time after Plymouth's founding in 1620...

The point is, baking occurred, regular baking, prior to the development of the in-house stove with oven in 1860. (You seemed to be saying something different in Post #20.) Baking occurred in other kinds of ovens or oven substitutes. Obviously the kind of baking people were able to do--or could afford--depended on their living circumstances. There were explosive demographic and urbanization changes in the Thirteen Colonies and the U.S. from 1620 to 1860, so of course that has to be taken into account. This discussion has rambled over three centuries, and perhaps that's why there may seem to be some differences among the various posts.

More interesting material about early colonial ovens--

A type of beehive oven in the Jamestown settlement, dated 1650-1690. It is unknown whether this was a freestanding outdoor oven or used as a hearth inset.

http://www.plymoutharch.com/howland-house-bake-oven/

A photo of a clome oven at Plimoth Plantation, dated 1627. Now this is fascinating to me.

http://blogs.plimoth.org/pilgrimseasonings/?p=127

Mention that Champlain and his men built a bread oven while exploring Cape Cod (1605-1606). I tell you, people want their fresh bread!

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2011/02/20/plymouth_archeologists_work_sparks_a_fervor_for_outdoor_ovens/?camp=misc:on:share:article

ETA: Corrected first link.

Edited April 29, 2013 by djyee100 (log)

[Lisa Shock]

Bread is really another topic. I was responding to "How did American bake lovely desserts for centuries using volume-only measurements?"

[Edward J]

 

I'm amused by accounts of how "difficult" it was for girls and women of other times to cook on hearth stoves and woodstoves. Difficult for them, or for us?

 

 

Difficult, in the fact that firewood had to be fetched, kindling had to be ready, and a fire had to be built using the embers of an existing fire.  Of course, that is assumed that there is sufficient firewood split and cut to stove lengths nearby, and the wood being sufficiently dry.

 

Jewish law forbids cooking and baking on the sabbath, why?  Becasue in order to bake in oven, ca -100 bc, the oven has to be hot.  How do you get a beehive or stone oven hot?  You build a fire in it, let it blaze for a good hour or two until the walls and hearth have absorbed the heat, then remove the remnents of the fire, sweep the hearth free of ash, and finally load the load the oven.

 

Difficult.

[quiet1]

Seems that it's a further reflection of the inaccuracy of using cup measurements. No standards, no consistency.

With reference to grandmothers and so on and cooking - I think one way they got predictable results was likely also enforcing some consistency within their own kitchen. My grandmother, for example, had a very specific spoon that she used for her tablespoon measure. It was just a normal spoon, not a purpose made measuring spoon, but by golly if she needed to measure something for a recipe, she was using that spoon and that spoon only. (It was kept apart from the regular table utensils.) She had a cup that she treated the same way, for larger quantities. So a new recipe might require some trial and error because her spoon was not likely the same as that of the person who wrote the recipe, but once she worked out the kinks and made adjustments, she could then relatively reliably repeat the results by using her own measuring techniques. It seems likely that many other people did likewise when baking in the home, (Plus familiarity with a recipe means you develop an eye for what texture things should be at different stages and so on, so if you are off a bit on a day, you're more likely to notice and be able to correct it or do a different thing if it isn't recoverable, so you don't lose the ingredients entirely.)

The thing is, I am much more likely to try a new recipe than my grandmother was, and I think part of that is because trying a new recipe was more of a production for her - more risk of things going wrong, more work to figure out if you needed to make adjustments, and of course in her day many of the ingredients were much more expensive so she didn't want to waste things trying something new when she had five mouths to feed. I don't like waste either, but no one in my household is going hungry if I mess up and have to throw away half a stick of butter and some flour and sugar and a couple of eggs, you know?

As far as my own method - after living in England for a while, I got converted to using a scale for baking and some cooking recipes. It really is much easier. When I have a recipe with volume measurements that I want to try, usually the first time I do it the normal way with the measuring cups and spoons. (I use the spoon and sweep method for flour, spoon and pack for brown sugar unless it says otherwise, etc.) Assuming I'm happy enough with the results, the next time I weigh as I go and make notes. For a long time I used the rec.food.cooking FAQ also for reference for how much the average cup of whatever should weigh, to make sure that what I was getting myself was in the right ballpark. Then in the future I just use the weights I've noted down. If I have problems I might go back to volume to double check what I'm doing, or see if there is more information from the recipe source about amounts, but for the most part my method works decently for most things.

(That said, for anything particularly delicate or sensitive, I usually don't even bother trying a recipe that uses volume measurements for everything. Something like a chocolate chip cookie can be forgiving if there is a little too much or too little flour in a batch - they might not come out perfect but chances are they will still be tasty. A light egg white based cake, on the other hand, can basically completely fail if the amounts are too far off, and the end result will be nothing like the goal. That is finicky enough I just look for more 'professional' sources in the first place, and those all use weights pretty much.)

[paulraphael]

Difficult, in the fact that firewood had to be fetched, kindling had to be ready, and a fire had to be built using the embers of an existing fire.  Of course, that is assumed that there is sufficient firewood split and cut to stove lengths nearby, and the wood being sufficiently dry.

 

And really difficult to regulate the temperature. When a new wood oven pizza place opens in NYC (there have been a lot in the lest several years) it typically takes them a year to get the hang of their oven. Before then the quality is wildly inconsistent. If they were baking cakes it would be worse!