Category: Pastry

Mighty proud of those biscuits…

…is that clabber girl. Behind is the family, mama and next-eldest daughter plucking a goose, while the younger kids (and cat) play in the feather box. And while I’m not totally sure, I believe that black earthenware pot just behind the little boy’s head (the thing with the spoon handle sticking out) is supposed to be the clabber jar. This is an item that was once a fixture in American kitchens prior to about 1900, the vessel in which leftover milk and/or buttermilk was left to “clabber” until it was sour enough to bake with.

READ ON

What is clabber?

A good question, reader Suzy. Clabber is/was nothing more or less than sour milk. Rural American housewives made it either by leaving milk out at room temperature (where it would be slowly soured by lactic acid-producing bacteria), or by combining milk with vinegar or even rennet. Depending on how clabber was made and how it was treated it could assume any one of several textures. It could be thick and spoonable, it could be a soupy, lumpy consistency, or it could be firm and dry, almost like a cheese. Mostly, clabber was a way to turn something that would otherwise go to waste (excess milk) into something useful.

Clabber came to America by way of the Scots-Irish: back-country Scottish lowland folk who were relocated to Northern Ireland (Ulster), but ultimately emigrated to the New World. The poorest of the poor of our early forebears, they could afford to waste nothing. Indeed, while the English slopped their hogs with the clumpy, curdled milk that remained after their cream was skimmed off, their Northern cousins would

READ ON

The First American Baking Powder

…was developed in 1856 by a fellow by the name of Eben Norton Horsford. Horsford’s baking powder used calcium phosphate as the acid. That made it not only far less expensive than Alfred Bird’s cream of tartar version, it made it much more dependable. The product was called Horsford’s Cream of Tartar Substitute. Why “substitute”? Because there was something of a “frankenfoods” scare at the time and cream of tartar was thought to be bad for you (nice to know some things never change). Eventually the panic over tartaric acid died down and Horsford renamed the product for an obscure character from American history: one Benjamin Thompson from Woburn, Massachusetts.

READ ON

From Baking Soda to Baking Powder

So it’s the mid-1800?s. CO2-producing carbonates are in common use among home bakers, as is cream of tartar. Why not get nuts, put the two together in dry powder form, and sell the whole shebang as a do-it-yourself one-scoop leavening reaction in a box?

That was the inspiration of one Alfred Bird, a pharmacist from Birmingham, England. Saddled with a spouse allergic to both yeast and eggs — but blessed with a talent for invention — Bird created the precursor to modern baking powder in 1843. It was, quite simply, a mixture of baking soda, cream of tartar and cornstarch (which served to keep the chemicals separated as well absorb moisture from the air).

READ ON

On Cream of Tartar

Joe Pastry: I’ll take organic chemistry for $400, Alex.

Alex Trebek: An organic acid salt, this by-product of the winemaking process will also help raise your biscuits.

JP: What is cream of tartar?

AT: Correct!

(CHEERS)

JP: Give me organic chemistry for $1000!

AT: Created under photochemical conditions, this is what results when 1,4-dimethylcyclohexane reacts with an equal number of moles of chlorine gas.

JP: Um…are you freakin’ kidding me?

Sure, you can spend your entire baking life making bubbles by mixing soda with acidic substances like buttermilk or sour cream. More than a few of our ancestors did. The trouble with that approach is it’s inconsistent. The weather might change and acid-producing bacteria in your clabber jar might stop growing or even go dormant. Or you might just run out. The solution? Ready-made, easily storable acid powder, the thing we know in America as cream of tartar. A little of that mixed into your baking soda batter and you get the very same reaction, every time.

READ ON

Talk About a TV Dinner!

If you are or ever were a Food Network viewer you’ve surely noticed how the channel has steadily moved away from shows that teach cooking to shows that simply show cooking. That’s deliberate and based on their discovery that viewers don’t want to learn to cook as much as they want to watch people cook. The latter seems to fill a deep-seated human need in a day and age where there’s less and less cooking. And while I miss those old Food Network shows I can’t fault them for catering to their audiences. If cooking voyeurism is what brings in the viewers and viewership is what keeps the lights on, then who am I to complain about it?

Now it seems the South Koreans have taken the basic idea a step further with eating voyeurism. That is, live streaming internet TV shows where people simply watch other people eat. As strange as that sounds

READ ON

Whatever got people baking with chemicals to begin with?

That’s a very interesting question, reader Charles. I don’t know the definitive answer to that, save for the fact that Native Americans were doing it well before anyone else. They were the ones who noticed that a little wood ash added to a grain cake batter created bubbles that lightened the finished product. My guess is that colonists to the New World took note of these practices and refined them to create what we now know as chemical leavening agents. These sorts of products would have been especially useful on the American frontier where, unlike back home in Europe, there were no village or estate bakeries where people could easily acquire bread. If Americans wanted bread they had to make their own — and chemical leavening was the quickest and easiest way to do that.

READ ON