Celebration Cake: or, In which we attempt to deploy icing decoratively

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are secretly foisting blogging challenges on our unsuspecting relatives! That's right, with my uncle and his fiancée visiting for the first time since their wedding which was yesterday, we're making cake! After all, the theme for this round of the Historical Food Fortnightly is making something with presentation, and what could be more presentational than a cake made from a recipe containing the line "garland plate with pink roses or other fresh flowers"?

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

Celebration Cake 2½ c cake flour (or 2¼ c all-purpose) 1 tbsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 1¾ c sugar, divided ⅔ c butter, margarine, lard, or vegetable shortening, at room temperature 1 c milk* 1½ tsp vanilla 5 egg whites Tinted sugar† Heat oven to 350°. Line the bottoms of two 9" round cake pans with wax paper, then grease them. Make a meringue of the egg whites and ½ c of the sugar: Beat the egg whites until frothy. Scatter the sugar, a spoonful or two at a time, over the surface. Try to sprinkle it so lightly that it doesn't deflate the egg whites it is landing on. Beat in the sugar thoroughly. Add the remaining sugar in the same way. You should have very stiff peaks, but if it's kinda floppy the cake should still come out fine. Set aside. Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining sugar. Cream the butter (you needn't clean the meringue off the beaters). Sift in the dry ingredients, add milk and vanilla, then beat on low speed for 2 minutes. Put in the meringue in all at once and beat one minute more. Pour into pans and bake for 35 minutes, or until done. Ice with seven-minute icing and sprinkle on tinted sugar. Garland with pink roses or other fresh flowers (yes, this line's in the original recipe). *If using butter, margarine, or lard, reduce milk by 2 tbsp. †To make tinted sugar, mix a little food coloring into a teaspoon of water. Add this to ¼ c sugar and mix with your fingers. Spread out onto a sheet of copy paper to dry. When it dries, break up the clumps (they should be loose enough to break up with your fingers) and fish out any sugar rocks that formed. All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer mixer, 1946

This recipe is surprisingly hard to read when you're up to your sifters in dry ingredients. They kept repeating the measurements and put every single brand mention in all capitals- which makes a lot of things you have to skip over while reading a recipe in fine print. Also, we had misgivings about using waxed paper in baking pans. Would the wax melt into the cake? I was sort of inclined to figure it can't be that bad for you, but people at the time also bought asbestos pads to put on their stove burners and asbestos oven mitts(!) and thought there was no conclusive proof smoking is bad for you. As a side note, don't start looking at photos of asbestos inspection and abatement. You'll find yourself unable to enter a building from before 1990 without getting paranoid.

Note our way of tracing out the pan size by smashing the paper over the pan for cutting a perfectly fitted circle.

Well, we're going to go ahead and put wax at the bottom of the cake this once. It's historical.

We're also going to actually sift things rather than skipping over that line and dumping it all into a bowl.

Yes. I actually sifted for once. It better make this cake come out good enough to justify digging out the sifter.

I gotta say, this recipe involves getting out a lot of bowls and other assorted kitchen crap. It's really galling to use a recipe that tells you to use a sifter three times, make a bowl of meringue, and separately cream the butter when the recipe then goes on to say "Now for the 'Mix-Easy' Part..."

Left to right: meringue, butter, milk and vanilla, dry goods.

I love how they don't actually tell you to do a meringue as such. They just throw that bit of direction in as an afterthought.  The recipe just says "Add five egg whites, beaten to a meringue" like that's not going to be the most failure-prone part of this recipe.

I say the meringue is the most failure-prone part of this recipe, but that's actually not where I messed up. I messed up at the point where you're supposed to get everything except the egg whites into a bowl and sic your mixer on them until it's all beaten. It didn't look right, somehow. I don't think cake batter is supposed to look like you've been kneading it or make the mixer produce pathetic whining sounds.

 

Checking the recipe to see if I forgot anything, I noticed I'd made a crucial omission.

Sure, adding all that extra sugar is going to change what you've got in the bowl, but this seemed too... solid. We checked and re-checked and re-re-checked that there wasn't supposed to be some liquid besides that one cup of milk in there.

All right, we've got literally everything except the egg whites mixed in. I don't think you're supposed to be able to stretch the alleged cake batter in your hands. I tore off a piece to see if it at least tasted right, and it was tough, gummy, overbeaten, and ready for the trash can. Upon re-re-re-rereading the recipe to see what went wrong, we discovered that we used only half the butter the recipe calls for. This is how we feel about wasting an entire two-layer cake's worth of cake components:

At this point, we decided that the recipe writers could take their excessive sifting and other tedium and shove it. Critics may point out that skipping half a recipe is not historically correct, but we would counter that it is very likely that many housewives looked at their culinary failures and mumbled "eh, fuck it" (though not loud enough for their husbands and impressionable children to hear) while doing the exact same.

Take two!

For our second attempt, rather than sifting, measuring, sifting, creaming, sifting again, and all that, we just dumped everything in the bowl and inserted the mixer.

The reward for half-assing the recipe? A bowl of perfect cake batter! Now, most recipes where you're putting in beaten egg whites will tell you to carefully fold them in lest you deflate the precious bubbles. This one just says to dump the whites in and have at them with the mixer until you have no more lumps of egg foam.

Looks good to me!

Right, with two pans of cake batter in the oven, it's time to turn our efforts toward the historically-correct seven-minute icing!

In the name of the Historical Food Fortnightly, we're even making the icing recommended in the cake recipe (actually, the recipe recommends two icings but the other has raw egg which apparently bothers other people) and pulling the icing recipe from the same pamphlet from whence came the cake! While the cake had a lot of ridiculously complicated steps, the icing looked near impossible to mess up. All you need to do is put all the things in the double boiler, place over hot water, and flog it with a mixer until the timer dings.

This shouldn't be hard.

Sure enough, at the seven minute mark, we had this glorious, creamy-dreamy, beautiful icing!

Look at it! It's so white it borders on unnatural. And it's just so darn pretty to look at. We have a fricken pot of clouds! Or so we thought. We smoothed out the top so we could cover it until the cake was ready to ice and this happened:

Our happy cloud of icing turned into gray cottage cheese! At this point, we were done with historical accuracy. Besides, look what putting it over a stovetop did to the mixer.

You're not a serious cook until your recipes cause carcinogenic fumes.

We briefly considered attempting the icing again, but we already had this many egg yolks just sitting out from all the whites we used today as it is.

We ended up scrambling them and putting them in the dog bowl.

Besides, we already had a really big pile of dishes. The icing could wait until we were no longer annoyed at throwing out a bowl of cake batter followed by a batch of icing and then having to wash everything. We didn't even start on the tinted sugar. Did I mention that you have to make your own sprinkles for this recipe? I'd have been infuriated at the extra work, but it only took 10 seconds for me to see that I had overdone it on the food coloring.

For those of you making your own pink sprinkles at home, tiny amounts red coloring don't make a nice pink. You end up with this weird, washy salmon color. Your really nice, pretty pinks come from using just a teeny dab of magenta, not red.

That pink is so nice, I feel like the Susan G Komen people are about to sue me for copyright infringement.

And so, having done all the work we were in the mood for, we left the cake layers cooling in pans and the sprinkles on a sheet of paper overnight to think about what they'd done.
The next day, it turned out that even if you're not comfortable introducing wax into your cake, the recipe writers were right to say you should line the pan with something. The cake and paper were very soundly glued together. I was so glad I could at least get the whole thing out of the pan in one piece.

Look at the cake refusing to let go of the paper.

And so, with our not-so-historically-correct buttercream icing (read: butter and powdered sugar), we attempted to actually ice the top and sides of a cake for the first time in memory. Seriously, even for our grandparents' anniversary we just dumped glaze on.

It looks like it's melting.

And wait! We have homemade sprinkles! We dyed the sprinkles ourselves!

Now, it was hard to come up with flowers. At this time of year, the best you can get are buds. While there definitely weren't any roses (pink or otherwise) blooming, we did manage to find enough open flowers on the purslane. So yes, we did actually garland the cake plate with flowers just like the recipe says. And so, to complete the presentation and also because they just got married a day ago, we finished the cake by coloring some of the extra icing and writing a special message. Sharp observers will see where I traced the letters out to make sure they were all well placed and then couldn't follow my own lines.

To my uncle and new aunt: Happy marriage!

Was the cake worth it? Well, it's worth all the effort I would have put into it had I not messed up so many times. Even doing my own sprinkles was a nice touch. Since sugar is ground finer than the colored crystal sprinkles, it didn't have the same annoying grittiness.

All right, here's our Historical Food Fortnightly homework!
The Recipe: Celebration Cake
The Date/Year and Region: 1946, America
How Did You Make It: Mess up the recipe repeatedly and somehow end up with cake.
Time to Complete: About 2 hours excluding baking time due to the aforementioned messing up.
Total Cost: Nothing. We already had everything.
How Successful Was It? Really successful! Everyone thought it was delicious!
How Accurate Is It? The cake itself: pretty accurate, though I didn't use cake flour, nor did I excessively sift everything. The icing: Not period correct at all. Or at least, I didn't see a recipe like it in the book.

Last-Century Blackberry Pudding: or, Using your own clothes as kitchen equipment

Today, for the Historical Food Fortnightly, we at A Book of Cookrye are looking at modernized versions of the food of yore!
Anyone who's interested in the Fortnightly will now be a bit annoyed at this. The whole point is to make things as close as possible to the original time, right? But even in days of yore, people longed to taste the food from days of even further yore. Recipes with "Old-Fashioned" or "Grandmother's" or similar in their names have been around since well before today's old-fashioned foods were daring innovations. And so, we at A Book of Cookrye found this.

The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, 1886 via Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project

This fortnight's challenge is fruit. We're actually kind of surprised that the fruit challenge is this early in the spring rather than later in summer when all the fruits are in season. But, since fruits are scheduled for this fortnight, we are making this!

Last Century Blackberry Pudding* 2 c molasses ½ tsp allspice ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp cloves ½ tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 1 egg (can be omitted) Flour 1½ pints blackberries Set a very large pot of water to boil. Mix the molasses, spices, salt, and baking powder. Beat in the egg. Add flour until your stirring spoon will stand up in the bowl. Lastly, stir in the blackberries. Now you get to boil it in a pudding bag†. You'll need a good-sized cloth that has no synthetic fiber in it (do you want melted plastic in your pudding?). You'll also need a lot of open counterspace. Wet the cloth in boiling water, wring out any excess, and scatter and rub in flour all over it before it cools off. Take the pudding and mound it in the center. Tie the rag around the pudding (you can knot the cloth or use string), putting a lump of flour where you close it. Leave room in the bag for the pudding to expand. Put the pudding in the pot. The water should completely immerse it. Make sure the pudding doesn't rest on the bottom of the pot or else it might burn. Some people attach a hook to it to suspend it in the water, others put an upside-down pan or something similar under it to make a little platform for it. When the water returns to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, keeping it just hot enough to gently boil. Boil for 2-3 hours. When it's done, take it up, set it on a plate, and let it sit out for a few minutes unopened. Then open the cloth, lay whatever plate you plan to serve it in on top of the pudding, get a good grip on the whole thing, and flip it over. Take off the cloth and it's ready. *For the sake of record, this recipe is halved from the original. †Or you can forget about period-correctness and use a small tube pan instead. Grease it before putting in the pudding and have something in the pot to keep the pan from touching the bottom. The water should come halfway up the sides. The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, 1886 (contributor: Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake)

These days, especially since so many old books are getting digitized, it's so easy to compare a recipe from a recent cookbook for Old-Fashioned Whatever to recipes from when Whatever was new. And of course, you'll see the ingredients and the directions changed to adapt to current tastes- or updated simply because in order to do the original, one would have to find now-obscure kitchen implements in the back corners of antique shops.
I mistakenly thought this cookbook was from the 1920's, and that the "Last Century" in the recipe name referred to the 1800's. But when I checked the date, I found that we're actually looking at someone in the late 1800's looking back at recipes from the 1700's. Someone from when electricity was just beginning to move from science experiments to public use is looking back to when most Americans had been born British subjects and kitchens had fireplaces with kettles hanging over them instead of stoves.

When you have to pour out a whole pint of the stuff, you find the existence of the expression "as slow as molasses" justified.

Since one can nowadays look up recipes from when puddings like this weren't yet considered old-fashioned, it's interesting to compare what's changed in the recipe since before it became old-fashioned and what stayed the same. Since Mrs. Devereux Blake just says "boil in a bag 4 to 5 hours," it looks like English-style boiled puddings still appeared a lot on American tables and women still knew how to make them. Otherwise, the recipe would have had a paragraph or two detailing just how to use a pudding bag instead of just directing that you use one. 
The most obvious change: There's no fat in this at all. Puddings like this used to have an ungodly amount of fat (usually beef suet) added. People who make recipes truer to the original than this one inevitably mention the fat coating the inside of their mouths when they eat it. I was glad  to see it omitted because it meant I didn't have to track down someone who still sells the stuff.
Now, one might think that maybe by the 1880's, suet was already getting hard to come by. But if that were the reason for taking suet out of the recipe, Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake would have put in a substitute (people usually use butter and mutter how it's not the same but it's the closest you'll get). Instead, she just took it right out of the recipe altogether. Maybe people in the 1880's were starting to get suspicious of such gratuitously fatty cooking (after all, a lot more people lived in the city and therefore didn't spend all day doing farm work). Or maybe using gratuitous amounts of suet (or a substitute) was considered too passé- even for a recipe billed as being old-fashioned.

If you don't like molasses, this recipe may not be for you.

The other recipe change, visible at about 12:30 in the above picture, is baking powder. While the first cookbook written in America is also the first to use what would later evolve into baking powder, the refined wood ash and other things people were using in the time period this recipe tries to emulate either didn't work reliably or left unnerving aftertastes. Since puddings like this involve such a long time working on them (usually), I doubt anyone in the 1700's would have risked all that time and ingredients on a baking powder failure.

I just thought this looked pretty.

Actually, this recipe was going pretty well. I'd always thought one of the reasons boiled puddings went out of style was that they were so hard to make. We were just dumping things into a bowl and stirring. Aside from waiting for all the molasses to pour out of the bottle, all we did was dump things into a bowl and stir. Before we knew it, the spoon was standing up.

...or, nearly so. We realized we'd forgotten one thing:

Granted, the recipe says we don't really need eggs, but we're already well out of familiar territory in making this. Even if Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake who contributed this recipe says it'll work without them, we didn't want to risk serving up a boiled lump of molasses-flour paste.
All right, we've only got one more thing to add here:

Yes, they're frozen. It's not period-correct, but have you seen the price of fresh blackberries this time of year?

And this brings us to the last thing changed in the recipe. Puddings like this usually call for five or six different kinds of dried and candied fruits, as well as multiple kinds of nuts. Nope, we're just using one type of fruit, and it's neither candied nor dried.

This may pass for pudding in England, but this is America.

At this point, we were pleasantly surprised at how easy this recipe was. All we had to do was dump things into a bowl and stir them together.  In a way, it was kind of a bummer because it mean that not fifteen minutes after starting this endeavor, we had to bring out our pudding cloth. But what could we use? We don't have any large rags around the house. We refused to go to a fabric store and buy cloth for something we're not likely to make again. We needed something made of all-natural fibers so it wouldn't melt in cooking. Something big enough to wrap around an entire... whatever this thing was.

Hopefully we don't dye the pudding blue.

The irony of making a pudding in a shirt that says I BEAT ANOREXIA BUT I LOST 30 POUNDS FIRST is not lost on me.

Be sure you don't use a shirt with silkscreening on it- you might end up with melted plastic in your pudding.

All right, we've got us a pudding. Let's just... oh God. Am I really doing this?

You know, the idea of cooking things in a cloth sack doesn't bother me. What I really don't get is how this isn't going to be a waterlogged mess when it's allegedly done. It's claimed that if you wet it with boiling water and coat it before it has time to cool down, water won't get in and ruin it. I've got no idea if that's true, but I do know my love of very long, scalding-hot showers finally paid off when I had to wring out a shirt dipped in boiling water and then smear flour all over it.

A final cooking tip: Either get one of those pots that is more of a galvanized bucket with handles (go to the nearest Mexican grocery and ask for a tamale pot), or give up and just put a bucket right on the stove, or be sure no one in the kitchen minds that no matter what you do, the water will spill over the rim every few minutes. Given how much the pot boiled over (even though we had the burner nearly as low as it went), we had no idea how the waterline remained right at the rim. We then noticed that the pudding had outgrown the pot.

To anyone who thinks we should have pushed the lid back into place: We tried. Whatever sort of pudding thing this is, it resisted getting downsized unnervingly well.
On the bright side, once it was in the pot, it really didn't need any more fussing from us. Yes, the cooking time is multiple hours, but we didn't have to do any basting, stirring, or anything else. Once we put some rags in the path of the water boiling out of the pot to absorb it before it got everywhere, we could just leave it and mind our own business until it was done. Seriously, once it was on the stove, it was like a Crock-Pot. We just ignored it. Heck, if you had a lot of things to make on the stovetop, you could just set this on the back burner, ignore it, and it will be fine while you do everything else.
When eventually the alleged pudding was done (or so we hoped- we had no idea how we're supposed to tell), we lifted it out of the pot.

Uh... well... at least it looks like those old British Christmas specials they air on PBS- so it must be going right. But in those shows, they typically remove it from the rag. Eager to see how this thing qualified as a pudding, we unfurled the shirt to reveal...

We'll let Ethel Mertz speak on our behalf.

They never look like that on those TV shows. Those British people in their 70's clothes don't bring in a poopy flower, they bring in this ball-shaped thing with a random piece of plant stuck in the top! It became ever more apparent that we had to somehow take this fragile, scalding-hot thing we had just made and turn it over without letting it fall apart and without giving ourselves some historic burns in the name of historic food. We clapped a plate onto it, flipped it over, and hoped for the best.

Well, at least we can get the rag out from under it now.

At this point we had uncertainty. Since we weren't going to serve it immediately, were we supposed to leave it under a wet rag until we were ready? Or would our friends come over and realize they were about to eat out of one of our shirts?

I think some of the blue dye got on the pudding.

So, eager to cut this thing open, we found... it's a cake.

As for the results: Everyone who tried this thing liked it. Seriously. I'm very surprised. It tastes like a spice cake. I was expecting something really soggy and tasting like cotton since it spent the entire time bagged up in it. I asked my (camera-shy) friends who came over to try it with me what they thought.

First person's answer: "It's good." He stopped there because he was too busy eating it.
Second person's answer: "It's interesting, taste-wise. Kind of like a cross between cake and pudding."

There was only one problem with this recipe, really. We'd invited five people over to try this. The randomly-placed obligations of adulthood being what they are, only two could make it. So, despite cutting this recipe in half, there were a lot of leftovers which were unnervingly getting darker on the plate.

However, this thing refused to go stale. It went the other way somehow- the center went runny (well, goopy) after a few days. The leftovers aren't so bad, though this has got to be one of the heaviest desserts ever featured on A Book of Cookrye. Unless you're making this for a lot of people, expect it to be with you for a while.


All right, here's our Historical Food Fortnightly homework!
The Recipe: Last Century Blackberry Pudding
The Date/Year and Region: 1886, America. Since the book has a list of all who contributed a recipe and where she's from, this specific recipe comes from New York City.
How Did You Make It: Dump molasses and spices into a bowl, stir. Add lots of flour, stir. Add an egg, stir. Add blackberries, stir. Somehow get it into a T-shirt dragged into service as a pudding bag. Boil and hope for the best.
Time to Complete: About 20 minutes of prep, followed by 3 hours of leaving it on the stove.
Total Cost: About $15ish.
How Successful Was It? A lot better than I thought! It was really good. It looked weird and wasn't like any pudding I've ever had, but everyone who tried it liked it.
How Accurate Is It? Pretty accurate. However, in the name of not spending nearly $10 on blackberries, we got frozen instead of fresh. It may be that the berries were supposed to break up as you stirred them into the really stiff pudding mixture, which obviously didn't happen since they were still frozen solid. Also, I did cut the recipe in half, but since people have been halving and doubling recipes since forever I don't think that counts as a mark against period accuracy.

Parthian Chicken: or, More Roman wine-soaked recipes!

We at A Book of Cookrye are now signing up for the Historical Food Fortnightly! Yes, every two weeks, those who are daft enough to sign up get to do a different challenge that involves dredging up really old recipes and finding out why they're forgotten. Will we do all of them? Eh... maybe. We'll see.
This fortnight's challenge is... roasts! And guess what we at A Book of Cookrye are about to do to some unfortunate animal! Yep, despite the utter disappointment that was our last ancient Roman wine casserole, we're making... an ancient Roman wine chicken! That's right, we're going to be baking a chicken in a massive pan of wine. It seems we never learn from our mistakes, and are doomed to forever bake things in excessive amounts of wine in the name of antiquity and those poorly translated plays we read in English class.

The Classical Cookbook, Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, 1996

Parthian Chicken ¾ c wine (we recommend red wine for a prettier colored sauce) 3 tbsp fish sauce ¼ tsp asafoetida powder 1 tbsp cilantro, finely chopped ½ tsp celery seed* 2 tsp caraway seeds 1 chicken Heat oven to 350°. In a casserole just big enough to snugly fit the chicken, mix all the ingredients. Dip both sides of the chicken in the sauce so it's coated all over, then put it in breast-side down. Cover and bake to an internal temperature of 160°. Uncover the chicken about halfway through to crisp the skin. Put black pepper on each serving (it makes more difference than you'd think) and spoon some of the pan sauce over it. *The cilantro and celery seed are our substitute for celery leaf, which the book recommends as a substitute for the lovage in the original recipe. adapted from de re Coquinaria (ca. AD 300) via The Classical Cookbook, 1996

We're trying to figure out why we're even trying another wine-soaked recipe after the last one tasted... like wine. Furthermore, this is right after one of our friends, well into his 20s, had his first glass of the stuff. His assessment: "It tastes like rotten grapes!" We at A Book of Cookrye can't dispute this. So why, since we don't really like wine anyway, are we doing this?

Oh boy. Rotten grapes.

On the bright side, this recipe has far less than a pint of wine. Also, we're not heating it up into a foul-smelling hot fish-wine concoction as we did the last time. Instead... we're adding these.

Be glad you can't smell this picture.

All right, let's back up and explain just what's in this picture. On the left, the stuff that looks like an unnerving pee sample is fish sauce. On the right, the little shaker with barely any English on it is asafoetida powder. And now, let's catch up those of you who don't know anything about the food of ancient Rome and didn't read the introduction of the cookbook we pulled this recipe from.
Fish sauce was used in place of salt in a lot of Roman recipes. It was, more or less, the same as the fish sauce used in Asian food today. It smells absolutely foul when you open the bottle because it is made of fermented fish. The chapter on "Unfamiliar Ingredients" promises us that it cooks down to a really nice, mellow flavor even though it smells terrible and tastes like salted roadkill when you open the bottle.
Asafoetida was used a lot as a spice in ancient Roman foods. If you say asafoetida out loud, you'll notice the word "fetid" is in the middle of it. This is not a coincidence. The smell more or less attacks you when you open the little shaker. For the record, we got this at an Indian supermarket. It is sold as a powder called hing ( for those who wish to procure it, the word rhymes with the first syllable of "ingress"). The store stocks it with the medicines, which is why we could not find it when we were patrolling the spices. Someone eventually came asking if we needed help after we'd been pacing back and forth on one aisle glaring at all the illegibly labeled shakers for about fifteen minutes. When we said we were looking for asafoetida for adding to a chicken recipe, he looked at us as if we had just asked if sufficiently large bulk purchases came with our choice of his children who have reached age of consent. Nevertheless, with great reluctance he led us to the medicine section and handed us the shaker seen above. We will warn those who wish to experiment with spices now sold in Indian medicine stores that this is not the time to shake them promiscuously all over your culinary perpetrations.

All right, that's the spiced wine ready to go.

As a last recipe note, the original recipe calls for some spice called lovage which no one sells around here. Purely for the heck of it (not that we can afford their prices anyway), we went to the hoity-toity gourmet grocery and asked if they sold it. We got this response:

This gif dedicated to Our Mom of Cookrye, who can recite the entire movie.

The chapter on Unfamiliar Ingredients says we can use celery leaves as a substitute for lovage. That may work in the UK (where the book was published), but here in glorious America they cut the leaves off of the celery prior to selling it. We would have had to buy three very large bunches of celery to get enough leaves to make up a spoonful. What does anyone do with that much celery? So we did like a lot of people do in the store: pinched one of the very few available leaves off of the celery, tasted it, and that is how we came up with our approximation of cilantro and a pinch of celery seed.

We at A Book of Cookrye have to tell you, this made the kitchen smell foul. The combination of fish sauce, asafoetida, and the surprisingly prevalent wine fumes added up to a foul mess that expanded into a rotting presence in the kitchen. It wasn't strong, but it was there. It expanded and took over the entire room. We worried it would go up the vent and travel through all the ducts.
Now, the original recipe quoted in the book makes it look like they're using a whole chicken. The modernized instructions use cut-up chicken pieces. We at A Book of Cookrye decided to go with a whole chicken for 2 reasons: it's so much easier to cut it up after it's cooked than before, and a roast whole chicken just looks so much more impressive on a platter even though all you do to cook it is shove it in the oven and leave it there.

The casserole came with a lid, but it wouldn't close over the chicken.

We were having flashbacks to the fish-wine pie as the oven began producing smells. The entire kitchen smelled like hot wine. Well, I say the whole kitchen smelled like hot wine and here I must admit I lied- I'd spilled some fish sauce on the counter and the stink it radiated had fouled up half the room. When part of the kitchen smells like rotten fish and the rest like hot wine, one loses faith in the recipe. We kept desperately opening the oven, hoping that it was starting to smell like chicken in there and it just hadn't spread to the rest of the kitchen yet.
Things got even worse as it baked. The asafoetida made itself known. Have you ever had anything good come of a recipe that made your kitchen smell like rotten fish, rotten grapes, and feet? At some point you start to think it's a good thing these recipes are now in the back of the library and not lurking in people's kitchens.

You know, it's funny. When one says they're making "chicken baked in spiced wine," it sounds so lovely. Spiced wine- that's some dainty thing with a cinnamon stick in the glass that gets handed around on BBC Christmas specials. You don't think it'll involve rotten fish and things from the back end of the Indian medicine counter. The stink this produced made us wish that, as in the days when this recipe was first published, the kitchen was a separate building. However, in the last 30 or so minutes, all the foul smells in the kitchen changed to the aroma of some damn good chicken.

Great. The chicken looks like it survived a flood.

You know what? This is pretty good. Like, really good. As in, not only did we save the leftovers, but we just put them on a plate instead of trying to hide the taste in a cheese casserole (not that you could with this recipe, anyway). It definitely tastes different than any other roast chicken we've ever made, but was so good we'd do it again. Besides, it's really easy.

All right, here's our Historical Food Fortnightly homework!
The Recipe: Parthian Chicken
The Date/Year and Region: AD 300ish, Rome
 How Did You Make It: See above! Or, in short, dumped the wine, fish sauce, and spices into a casserole, stirred it real quick, inserted the chicken, and baked.
Time to Complete: About 15 minutes plus baking time.
Total Cost: The chicken was already in the back of the freezer with the price tag worn off, and most of the spices were already buried in the cabinets. The cilantro was $1 for three bunches, the caraway was $1.25, and the fish sauce was 67¢ for the mini bottle.
How Successful Was It? A lot better than the smells in the kitchen led us to believe. We're keeping the recipe. It's nothing like anything we'd make today, but really fricken good. Using a casserole barely big enough to jam the chicken definitely made it better since more of the spiced wine soaked into it.
How Accurate Is It? Not bad for someone trying 1700-year-old recipes without a museum budget. We had no lovage, and since there aren't many spices in the recipe it probably made a noticeable difference. The original text quoted over the modern recipe is for a chicken baked whole rather than in pieces, so that's what we went with. However, we have no idea what a "Cuman dish" is supposed to be, so we have no idea if inserting the chicken into a casserole is the same as arranging it in a Cuman dish as directed in the original.