Breakfast from Addy's Cook Book

A peek into Ruth Walker's kitchen!

Next up in my slow, slow attempt at cooking everything in the original Pleasant Company historical character cookbooks are the breakfast offerings from Addy’s Cook Book. After 2017’s success at making everything on Samantha’s breakfast menu, I decided a long term goal for the blog would be making the full course meals included in these cookbooks. It’s quite an undertaking, and so I don’t think I’ll be churning out one every month, but it had been a while since I’d featured an Addy recipe and decided she seemed like a good candidate for the full course meal treatment. 

Like Samantha’s breakfast, Addy’s menu is filled with things that are both historically something the character might have eaten for a fancy, full breakfast, and are still largely familiar items to modern Americans: grits, sausages, gravy, biscuits, fried apples and scrambled eggs. I enlisted the help of my wife to help me prepare everything and we invited two of our neighbors over to enjoy this peek into dining in the past. Read on to see how it went!

Addy’s Cook Book is one of the most interesting in the series. All the cookbooks include historical information about meal times, food prep, and the changing American palate, but I feel like Addy’s manages to impart some really interesting information in its pages. Specifically, it doesn’t shy away from the realities of slavery, and how customs and traditions from enslavement followed Black Americans into their new lives in freedom. Instead of generically noting that biscuits were a common side dish on American tables of the past, there’s inset text discussing how buttermilk – the byproduct of making butter – was sometimes the only source of calcium an enslaved person would receive as part of their diet. It highlights how unjust conditions in slavery were, while also highlighting why Ruth Walker would turn to buttermilk as a familiar ingredient in baking and meal prep. 

I sometimes feel like the food trivia in some of the other cookbooks can be a little bland or sometimes even irrelevant to the character’s historical time period or the recipe itself. Adding these little factoids helps bring the recipe to life in a more meaningful way, especially on a subject that a lot of Americans don’t really know much about. 

I decided to start off with the hominy grits, the first recipe listed in the cookbook and the one that required the most prep time. When I saw this listed in the index way back when I first ought this cookbook, I assumed that it would just be grits prepared the same way you’d always prepare grits, but it’s actually a simple grit casserole. 

To start, get four cups of water boiling on the stove and add one cup of quick grits. Cook over low heat for five minutes and then set the grits aside to cool. Meanwhile, grease a casserole dish with butter and separate two eggs. Whisk the egg yolks together and add them to the cooled grits along with 1/2 of a cup of heavy cream, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of pepper, or more if you want. 

Next, whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks and fold that into everything else. Put everything into the casserole dish.

This bakes in the oven at 350 for an hour and a half, giving you a decent amount of time to prep your other ingredients. 

Next up, I decided to tackle the sausages, as this was also going to be slightly time consuming and easily reheatable if they got too cold in the interim. This is another item that’s right at home on Addy’s breakfast table. While many families still made their own sausage in 1860, a working mom like Ruth Walker who lived in a large city like Philadelphia would have a variety of options available at local butchers or other shops that would help cut down on prep time in the kitchen. It’s perfectly acceptable to use store-bought links here, and any brand of breakfast or specialty sausage you prefer would work fine. 

The cookbook instructs you to cook your sausage in the pan over medium high heat until well browned on all sides. This should take about 15 to 20 minutes.

Once that’s done, set them aside and cover them with foil to keep them warm, then pour off the drippings until you have about one third remaining for the base of your gravy. 

I really don’t tend to like gravy. I don’t usually use it unless it’s being served to me at a restaurant, probably because I just didn’t grow up eating it with sausages or biscuits, so it’s not something I tend to turn to or crave. It also means that I’ve only made pan gravy a handful of times in my life, and as it can be a little finicky, I was concerned going in that this was going to be a giant mess. 

All the more concerned when I started whisking in the flour and discovered wow, this is getting really, really lumpy. You’re to add in 1/3 of a cup of flour to the drippings and whisk it together quickly, then carefully and slowly add one cup of water to the pan, whisking constantly. When the mixture’s smooth, you add one cup each of milk and heavy cream, along with salt and pepper to taste. 

Honestly, mine didn’t get non lumpy until we added the milk and cream, and for a while I was worried we were either going to have super lumpy gravy or I’d need to break out my immersion blender to try and save it. Fortunately, it did start to come together, and I cooked it as instructed for about fifteen or twenty minutes to get it to the desired thickness.

The final steps were to make the apples, biscuits and scrambled eggs. I had prepped the apples beforehand after discovering my grocery store didn’t have an apple corer, so it took longer than it probably would have if I’d been able to just immediately slice out the middles. Jess took over the frying. 

The book instructs you to take four firm apples, core them, and slice them into 1/2 inch thick rings. Add 1/3 of a cup of butter and 1/4 of a cup of water to a pan and warm them over medium heat until the butter has melted. Add the apples to the pan and let them cook for about 10 minutes, turning them a few times while they cook. 

For flavor, sprinkle 1/3 of a cup of firmly packed brown sugar (light or dark isn’t specified, but I think we can all agree that dark is best) and two tablespoons of lemon juice over the apples. Make sure to gently turn and mix the apples so they’re all evenly coated. 

Finally, take the skillet off the heat and cover with a plate for five minutes to let them finish cooking.

Jess also tackled the biscuits while I was finishing the gravy and eggs. This was a really basic biscuit recipe: cut four tablespoons of shortening or lard (we used butter) into 2 cups of flour, 4 teaspoons of baking powder, and 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. Once the mixture looks sandy, you’re ready to add in 2/3 of a cup of buttermilk and gently mix the ingredients together until they’re just combined. Roll it out onto a floured surface until the dough is 1/2 inch thick and cut into rounds. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes at 375 degrees or until golden brown. 

Simple right? So we made an executive decision that you didn’t need to see in progress photographs of what these looked like. 

Same goes for the eggs. The scrambled eggs were – unsurprisingly – the easiest part by far. I cracked six eggs into a bowl, whisked them with a fork, and added them to a hot pan with melted butter. I stirred them around until they were well cooked, put them in a bowl, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and chopped chives rather than green onions because that’s what we had on hand.

And with that, we were finally ready to get everything plated and out on the table.

Going into this, I assumed this would be a lot easier than Samantha’s breakfast because there was no deep frying involved. Making those Saratoga potatoes took a really long time, and created a relatively annoying mess to clean up afterward. It’s also definitely not something I’d recommend an eight year old try to tackle on their own, or even possibly heavily supervised, making it a sort of weird choice to add to a cookbook aimed at kids. 

After all’s said and done though? I think Samantha’s was actually slightly easier to manage. The strawberries and cream required minimal prep, and the Saratoga potatoes and blueberry muffins could both be made in advance, meaning you’re not rushing to get everything done on the day off. Addy’s required a lot of irons in the fire, literally. Once everything was finished, we were ready to go and serve, but I honestly don’t know how I would have done this without Jess in the kitchen helping me out. The timing just doesn’t work to keep everything hot and fresh all at the same time. 

That said, none of these recipes were especially difficult or demanding. Almost every ingredient you probably already have in your pantry or fridge, or can get relatively quickly and cheaply from your grocery store. Many of these steps will be familiar to even a fairly novice chef, meaning it would probably be a good themed breakfast to try for a kid or less experienced cook. I just find timing things like this very tricky, and I tend to get stressed out if all the side dishes aren’t ready to go at the same time. It’s so much easier to make a meal with two or three components instead of five. 

I also had one complaint about the portions of the recipes: six eggs is fine split between four people with the rest of the sides, but the recipe says it should be able to serve at least up to six. Easy enough to fix, but similarly, the biscuit recipe said you’d get enough, dough to roll out a dozen biscuits at 1/2 inch height before they baked. There was no way we would have been able to make that happen with the amount of dough we had when following the recipe. Jess coaxed twelve biscuits out, but about 3/4 of them needed to be 1/4 inches high in order to get a dozen biscuits. Unsurprisingly, these didn’t puff up in the oven, while their fatter cousins puffed up really nice and flaky. That, to me, says this is a good biscuit recipe (and they certainly tasted lovely!) but the instructions are misleading and shouldn’t be followed to a T. If you really need twelve biscuits, double the recipe or make them tiny.

Taste wise? This was fine. Nothing especially exotic or exciting, but tasty enough and it fed four adults easily with few leftovers. The biscuits were really nice, and I was pleased with how my gravy turned out, but the meal itself wasn’t exactly exciting in the same way a lot of my experiments on this blog have been. I’ve eaten each element of this dish many times in my life, so I can’t really say there was anything special or unique about the eggs or sausages. 

That said, sometimes something simple and unexciting can be a really nice meal because it’s familiar, and I think that’s really the selling point of this particular ensemble. Historical cooking doesn’t always need to be experimental or strange, and you can get a more or less authentic look at what eating in the 1860’s was like with this menu without driving yourself insane looking for unusual ingredients or wondering if your hard work is going to pay off with your diners. Very few people need coaxing or convincing to give scrambled eggs a shot, so if you’re looking for a meal that will get you into the kitchen without scaring you away from ever trying it again, I’d definitely say this deserves a shot!

Now to decide which breakfast we'll try out next...