First Chefs and a Seed Cake with Jane

A temporary exhibit that really brings you a sweet taste of history!

Last post, I mentioned an exhibit at the National Archives that I had missed out on years ago. Living in DC, such worries are a thing of the past, unless of course there's a cool exhibit going on at a non DMV area museum. Take the current exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library: First Chefs! 

First Chefs spotlights books, documents and artifacts from the library's collection, as well as a few other local institutions that help bring to life how and what people in Britain and North America ate in the late 1500's through the 1700's. The exhibit shines the spotlight on several interesting figures in culinary history, as well as showing the public that more extravagant food often meant exploiting the labor of enslaved people, women, servants, and laborers. Read on to see highlights from the exhibit and a recipe inspired by one of the personalities featured in the gallery!

The Folger Library is located a few blocks down the street from the Library of Congress. It's an independent library that boasts the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, as well as countless other priceless books and manuscripts. The Folger Theatre puts on a season of plays inspired by Shakespeare or the works of the Bard himself. I've walked by it many times on my way to and from the Library of Congress, but had never visited before hearing about this exhibit. Of course, being a food history person, I dragged the whole grad school gang down with me and Jane. 

The library's temporary exhibitions are free and open to the public, so it's definitely worth coming down to see what they have out on display. This exhibit spotlighted five different personalities who represent different perspectives and aspects of culinary history from this period. They include Thomas Tusser, who wrote an agricultural book entirely in prose aimed at the common man, Hannah Woolley, the first female celebrity chef, Robert May, the first author of a cookbook aimed at professional chefs, William Hughes, a pirate obsessed with botany who helped introduce chocolate to Britain, and Hercules, the extremely talented personal chef of George Washington who stole himself to freedom.

Most of the artifacts in the exhibit are books and documents from the Library's collections, including the only known copy of Hannah Woolley's earliest book. Other objects featured are on loan from places like Mount Vernon and the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. The Library has done a really cool job of trying to find artifacts that relate to parts of the history that aren't well preserved, like the perspective an illiterate servant or early colonist to the Americas might have had, as well as giving voices to women, African Americans and Native peoples involved in changing British cuisine.

Jane was particularly excited to see the artifacts on loan from Jamestown. I can't believe I've lived down here for two years and haven't yet found time to head down there for some photos with Jane in her hometown. Maybe later this year!

A really impressive part of the exhibition was the interactive book displays. The Library had digitized six books in their collection and had a touch screen display where you could page through literally every single page in beautiful high resolution. Most books were cookbooks, but one focused more on medicinal recipes for anything from boils to fevers. We had a lot of fun "thumbing" through these and taking a look at some of the recipes.

There were some fun interactives aimed at kids, which encouraged them to think about where they get their food from and how foodways have changed.

Which also included a wall where visitors could write about their favorite culinary memory or share a recipe, with lots of different colored pencils for illustrating their submissions. It was a lot of fun looking through what other people had written, as some of them were just genuinely very funny and others quite touching. One recipe for fruitcake sounded a lot like the one I made with Nanea for Christmas this past year!

I included Jane's recipe for Indian pudding, which I shared on the blog a few years ago and now is a staple of my family's Thanksgiving dessert spread!

But my favorite part of the exhibit was definitely the free recipe cards they had available for visitors to take home and bring a bit of history into their kitchens! I love when exhibits do this, and have quite a stash of recipe cards from similar displays, most of which have sadly gone untested so far. But I knew I wanted to make one from this set to share with all of you and was very eager to get started!

Again, perhaps unsurprisingly given my enthusiasm for baking and love of cake, I immediately gravitated towards the Thomas Tusser inspired seed cake. Seed cakes are a classically British baked good, which I was first introduced to when my dad read me The Hobbit as a small child. Bilbo's enthusiasm for them intrigued me, but I'd never actually come across one to try myself before getting this recipe card in hand. 

The recipe itself isn't a historic one written by Thomas Tusser himself, but it is based on a historic recipe and adapted for a modern audience by Marissa Nicosa of Rare Cooking, a really interesting blog that focuses on updating recipes from historic cookbooks to a modern kitchen. I would definitely recommend checking out her work! 

To start off, you're to grease a spring form pan and line it with parchment paper. In a bowl, mix together 1 cup of flour, 7 teaspoons of caraway seeds, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of mace. In a separate bowl, cream together 1 stick of room temperature butter, 1 teaspoon of rosewater, and 1/2 of a cup of sugar. Add one whole egg to the wet ingredients along with one tablespoon of sherry and mix well. Finally, add in the dry ingredients and mix. You'll end up with a really thick batter that definitely feels more like dough than cake batter.

Next, whip up two egg whites "until they hold their form". I think I might have whipped mine a little too vigorously, as they were definitely at stiff peak stage when I stopped. The recipe instructs you to fold these into the batter very gently, "maintaining the fluffiness of the whites even if it means the batter looks clumpy." I was really skeptical about this. I've made other historical cakes with no chemical leavening agents before, and one of the first ones I did I definitely didn't fold in the egg whites well. Certain slices had weird, almost spiderweb looking clumps in them that were extremely off putting and did not taste good, so I tried to make sure I was incorporating the eggs even at the expense of fluffiness. 

Once that was done, I poured it into my prepared cake pan.

The cake bakes at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until the cake is golden and a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. My cake was done at the 40 minute mark exactly, so I took it out of the oven and let it cool for ten minutes before trying to take out of the pan.

After impatiently waiting for the cake to cool, I eagerly cut a piece to see what it tasted like!

It's a little hard to tell from the photos on the recipe card, but I think my cake might be a tiny bit flatter than Marissa's. The cake was definitely fluffier in the middle than around the edges, but there were no bits of cooked egg to be seen, so I was a really happy camper. 

Plus, it smelled delicious, and looked really inviting!

This seed cake was super, super tasty. Texture wise, it was a little dense, like most historic cakes are, but it wasn't heavy. If you made a double batch of the batter, the cake would likely be fluffier as the resulting cake would be taller. 

So, confession time: none of the grocery stores near us had rosewater, so I substituted vanilla the way I did with Felicity's Queen Cakes. This worked out for me, because I tend not to love rosewater as a flavor, whereas vanilla is delicious, so flavor wise, I was very into this cake. I also liked the caraway seeds a lot, and Jess was surprised at how much she liked it, because she's really not a fan of caraway seeds and this recipe does have quite a lot of them. I thought the caraway definitely had a presence in the cake, but I totally agree with her: they weren't the stand out flavor, so if you're not really a fan but can tolerate a subtle hint of caraway, I'd say you'd be safe giving this one a shot. The seeds did make for a nice, crunchy bite, which was a lot of fun, and it paired extremely well with tea. I have to admit, I intended on bringing it in to work to let my coworkers try some, but I liked it so much, I ended up keeping the leftovers to share with wifey instead. 

This is a recipe we will definitely be making again and I would absolutely recommend trying it out yourself. 

First Chefs will be at the Folger Library until March 31. If you're local or visiting the District before the end of the month, head down there and check it out for yourself! If you can't make it, but still want a taste of early American cuisine, the Folger Library has published the recipes online. Let us know if you try any of them out yourself!

Or if you check out the exhibit!