Creamy Pumpkin Wastersupper for the Invalid

Sometimes I doubt if I have the true grit and crazed single-mindedness to be a writer. But not today. For today I looked at my sick wife and toddler, both suffering from the same cold I myself had, and thought, “This is the perfect chance to test some invalid cooking.”

Invalid cooking, if you’re not familiar with it, is cooking for the sick – more specifically, the perpetually or terminally sick. It's not a chapter you'll find in a modern cookbook, but no Victorian era cookbook was complete without it. Though it’s tempting to say that it’s because people don’t care for their ill or disabled family in their home any more, statistics show this isn’t the case. It’s certainly not because modern medicine has done away with long lingering deaths. If anything, modern medicine does an even better line in long, lingering deaths than its Victorian counterpart.

I think the fall of ‘invalid cooking’ probably came about because of changes in attitudes towards the disabled and ill, who are no longer seen as a different species (at least not in the circles I travel in). When my wife’s mother was dying of cancer, she ate whatever she damn well chose, which was mainly Twisties.

Invalid cooking was still rattling round the margins of our society until relatively recently. At her blog I Taught them How to Cook, Jenny Ridgewell recounts the horror of trying to excite cookery students in 1970s London about the prospect of serving a tasteless aspic on a starched white cloth to a sick person in bed. An even more recent appearance, from my own bookshelf none the less, is in the 1997 edition of the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union Cookbook – a work of rural cookery so classic that even Wild Colonial Grandma uses it, despite having views on religion that make Richard Dawkins look like a lily-livered moderate. The good old PWMU suggests such invalid cookery classics as barley water, beef tea, and steamed chicken. It's selections are notably light on flavour, body, or crunchy bits.  

This takes us neatly into the issue of what made the cut as invalid cooking: essentially, the thinner, less flavoursome, and less nutritious, the better; as Victorian ideas about illness posited that people in their weakened state couldn’t handle anything that took too much digesting. (You can read more about the Victorian understanding of illness at this great page from the Victoria and Albert Museum).

Of course doctors still believe that diet can play a role in health, but in the modern era dietary recommendations are usually specific to the condition. For instance, as I speak my household labours under a diet to prevent my wife’s prediabetes getting too big for its britches and turning into the full-blown kind.

So considering all this, you might wonder why I decided to subject my sick family to this fossil of a food genre. Apart from my newly-found overweening literary ambition, that is.

Well, in addition to being easy on their presumably fragile digestive system, a lot of invalid food also had an element of comfort about it. Warm broths, creamy porridges, soothing teas – just the sort of thing to help a modern person through the horror of the common cold.

The recipe that I chose to attempt was selected purely on the basis that we already had all the ingredients at home. I had, after all, been up the night before at 3AM trying to breastfeed a toddler whose entire being seemed geared towards the production of snot and misery. But it turned out to be a happy selection. Not only does this recipe have interesting things to tell us about colonial Australian food culture (more Germans than you’d perhaps expect); not only did it produce a dish unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a modern cookery book or tasted in a modern restaurant; it also turned out to be one of those rare recipes that work so well on their first go that they become an instant family favourite.

So here it is: pumpkin soup, of a kind you’ve never even considered. Made with four ingredients and almost zero cooking technique, it’s a beautiful pale yellow, and creamy without being heavy – a sort of airy savoury custard. Containing a glass of milk and about 200g of completely hidden veggies per serve, we’re talking about a health food here, but if anything it feels like a sweet treat. For people feeling nauseous, or too tired to operate a knife and fork, this is the sick-bed meal for you.

Yes, I realise I’m raving, but I’m 90% sure it’s not the sleep deprivation talking. I can say in all honesty that when I’m sick in the future, this is what I will cook.

 

Here is the original recipe:

Waster Supper, or water soup, is a term they apply to all kinds of soup which re- quire no wine or stock. They are very nice for invalids. I will give a very pala- table one.  

Pumpkin Soup. - Cut the pumpkin in slices and throw the rind away, Boil it in milk until soft, and add a little butter, cinnamon, and sugar. Pass it through a cullender before serving.

DOMESTIC COOKERY. (1873, May 2). Portland Guardian and Normanby General Advertiser (Vic. : 1842 - 1876), p. 3 Edition: EVENINGS. Retrieved August 3, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65430054

 

Creamy Pumpkin Soup for the Invalid.
(Photo taken by an invalid - be kind!)

 

 

 

Creamy Pumpkin Wastersupper for the Invalid

Ingredients

450g pumpkin (weight without skin)

570ml milk

1 t butter

A few shakes of cinnamon per bowl or mug

Cooking Time

Half an hour or less, depending on how thinly you slice the pumpkin

Servings

2 hearty bowls, or three pathetic man-flu soup mugs

Method

Slice the pumpkin as thinly as you can without getting fussy about it. The thinner the slices, the quicker it will cook, but don’t stress – you are ill, not auditioning for Masterchef.

Put the pumpkin and milk in a small to medium sized saucepan. You’ll know you’ve got it about right if the milk almost or completely covers the pumpkin. If it doesn’t, add another dash of milk. Now is no time for dirtying two saucepans, and the recipe is pretty forgiving.

Bring to the boil, and then turn down to a low simmer. Put the lid of the saucepan on ajar, and cook until the pumpkin is starting to break up. If you cut it nice and thin, this will happen in about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Remove from the heat and blend until completely smooth.

Return to the heat, and add the butter. Stir until the butter has melted, and is thoroughly combined in the soup.

Serve in bowls or mugs, with a shake of cinnamon on top.

It’s sweet already, but if you want it super sweet stir in a teaspoon of sugar or your favourite alternative sweetener.

Enjoy, you sad, sick specimen.

Very Nice Chocolate Butter

Chocolate butter - eat it on scones, eat it with a spoon.

As I wade through the morass of tersely worded recipes in old Colonial Era newspapers, I find a lot of dishes that have died a natural death. Whether they include poisonous ingredients, unpalatable parts of various beasts, or truly unnecessarily convoluted processes, I am left with a clear impression of why they have not become an Australian classic.

But this recipe is different. When I read the delicious ingredients list and the simple method, all I could think was: Where have you been all my life, chocolate butter?

Now I wouldn’t have thought it possible for someone to not instantly warm to this dish, but my mum, Wild Colonial Grandma, is a tough nut to crack. She, like any good country woman, has strong opinions on every foodstuff, and to her, chocolate is rich.

When I presented her with some of my newly made gooey bounty, she cast a gimlet eye over it, and asked what one did with it. I replied, slightly stunned, that you put it on anything that you thought could do with a bit more butter and chocolate. She was unmoved. Eventually she conceded that it might go well in a pudding or tart. So if you’re looking for serving suggestions (other than “Spoon straight into mouth”) you could start there.

On a historical note, the 1860s was an exciting time for chocolate lovers. Although one might argue that with the caffeine content of chocolate being what it is, chocolate lovers’ are always excited. But in 1847, Joseph Fry – yes, he of Fry’s Chocolate – did something amazing when he added back in some of the cocoa butter that the Dutch had just worked out how to remove from coco beans. By mixing coco powder and coco butter, he created chocolate as we know it today – malleable and ready to be combined with all manner of yummy things in block form. No doubt for the Dutch this was jolly frustrating.

This was the point in history where coco powder and chocolate bars began to diverge, and it was an exciting time of culinary experimentation. And what better ingredient to experiment with than chocolate! Bars of pressed coco solids were still in circulation at this point, though, and from what it says in the recipe I assume that is what is called for. Coco powder (Dutch, if you can get it!) is the best modern equivalent.

Here is the original recipe, from 1865 (Predating Nutella by almost a decade!):

Chocolate Butter—The following is a German recipe, and will be found a very nice compound to eat with bread instead of plain butter. Stir a quarter of a pound of butter over the fire until quite soft and creamy; put two cakes of good Vanilla-flavoured chocolate on a tin plate, and sprinkle them gradually with milk until they become so soft that you can mix them with the butter, then stir them well into it. Serve it cold, in whatever shape you like.

RECIPES. (1865, March 25). The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), p. 3.

 

Ingredients

3T coco powder (unsweetened – if you are using sweetened coco add less sugar)

3T caster sugar

1/4t vanilla essence

3T milk

110g (1 stick/ 4oz) butter

A dusting of coco powder for presentation

 

Cooking Time

15 minutes, and that was with a toddler helping. Make of that what you will.

 

Quantity

1 medium jar, or two small serving bowls.

 

Method

Put the coco, caster sugar and vanilla essence in a bowl. Add the milk, and mix until there are no lumps.

Put the butter into a small saucepan, and heat over a very low heat, stirring constantly, until the butter has melted, and has a creamy look. You don’t want it to boil, as this will begin to separate the butter and clarify it. You will get ghee, and “Chocolate Ghee” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Once the butter has melted, turn off the stove, and stir in the coco mixture.

Tip your newly made chocolate butter into the container you want to store it in (you will not need to store it for long, trust me!), and allow to cool. You might use a plastic Tupperware container, or a dish that will look nice on the table. Put it in pretty jars if you would like to give it as a gift.

You can make the top of this dish look prettier by dusting it with coco. To get an even result, shake it on through a sieve.

You can store chocolate butter in the fridge for a few months. I would love to hear from anyone who has resisted eating it long enough for it to go off.

Use on toast, crumpets, or wherever else you would like more chocolate and butter.

 

Note: If you like dark chocolate, add an extra tablespoon of coco. If you are a sweet tooth, add an extra tablespoon or sugar. If you like strong flavours, add an extra tablespoon of both.

 

What did you put your chocolate butter on? I’d love to hear how you used it.