On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Karen<laurvick@charter.net> wrote:
> Awesome! Thanks for sharing! And I know that Joy of Cooking book is quite
> old, isn't it? Amazing that you can find GF recipes in it!
It doesn't actually have "GF" recipes in it, and yes, it's quite old.
Actually I'm not sure they even knew what caused celiac when
it was published, and for many years after it was considered a
baby disease that people grew out of.
Thing is, in the old days, flour didn't have so much gluten in it.
In George Washington's day, "flour" (spelled "flower", really!)
didn't necessarily even mean flour from wheat. So the recipes rely
on eggs and other ingredients to make them fluffy.
And, in older days, meals weren't all about starch. In our
environment now, most of the food in the market revolves around
the government-subsidized crops: corn, soy, sugar, wheat.
But in years past, food revolved around what you could easily
grow in your yard: collards, cabbage, beans, potatoes,
grapes, apples, squash, cows, chickens, pigs. Wheat flour was
expensive and hard to keep (they hadn't invented Tupperware
yet, and it got moldy and got bugs and went rancid).
So when you look at what, say, George Washington had at
a party ... you can do that, they published menus for parties
in the paper gossip columns ... you see that they had like
7 different kinds of meats, a mess of different vegetables,
dried fruits and nuts, a ridiculous amount of alcohol, and
then here and there some bread and pastry. Poor people
would have cider, cabbage, pork fat, and oat gruel.
Ditto for the recipes. There certainly are desserts, but you
don't get the impression this was a daily thing, and most of
the meals revolve around vegetables and meat. Actually it
reminds me a little of Asian cooking: your average Chinese
dinner has vegetables cooked in a huge variety of ways.
Sometime after the harvesting combine got invented and
even more after food subsidies got invented, our food mix
changed, until today "vegetables" are sort of an ignored
side-dish except at Thanksgiving, meat is a condiment,
and the main meal consists of a mess of starches and
sugars and canola and soy.
So you can pick out most of the recipes in those old cookbooks
and 1) they don't rely on wheat 2) they are basically healthier
3) they are really, really yummy!
The "flour" recipes tend to be very heavy on eggs and
work with GF flour. I use coconut milk and coconut oil though,
instead of cream and butter.
The one thing I can't do is make a nice kneaded bread dough.
However, I can do that by using Chebe mix, when I feel the
need to make something really bready, like calzones.
Adding a little Chebe to pie dough makes it more workable too.
</ END RANT >
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