Caroline's Hasty Cornmeal Pudding

The breakfast of choice for most of your favorite historical characters!

Some recipes are so incredibly simple that they can stick around as a staple on family tables for generations. Take hasty pudding for example: this simple hot breakfast would've been an easy option for Caroline's mother or grandmother to whip up for breakfast, and it's something Caroline could learn to make herself as soon as she was old enough to be trusted near an open fire. 

But this dish has a much longer history, and is an appropriate breakfast for characters well beyond Caroline's time. Read on to find out more about the history of this breakfast staple!

Grace's Worms in Dirt

As Beatrice's mother would say, "Eat your dirt!"

Happy Halloween, everyone! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I'm always excited to get a chance to celebrate it. Admittedly, that usually gets a little harder to do when you get older and trick or treating if off the table, but now that I'm finished with school and employed, I decided this year I'd throw my first ever Halloween party. 

The theme? A certain animated miniseries that perfectly blends Americana, folklore, fairy tales, and general Halloween fun called Over the Garden Wall. Jessi and I carefully planned a menu full of treats inspired by the show and one of them is an old favorite classroom treat of mine: worms in dirt. Read on to learn a little about the history of this perfectly spooky treat!

Julie's Watergate Cake

Served with Cover Up Icing and chock full of nuts!

I've never really been a huge fan of debating or trying to pinpoint the most important moment in history. How is that even something you can quantify? Even if you narrow it down to American history, or recent American history, or American history within the last fifty years, there are so many different candidates for the title that arguing about it has always felt a little pointless and silly to me, like the historian's version of "Could Superman beat Batman in a fight?"

That being said, I don't think anyone could ever question that the Watergate scandal is one of the biggest, most defining moments in American history, especially in terms of the world we live in today. It rocked the nation's trust in the presidency (and politicians in general) and let loose a runaway freight train of journalism and media frenzy that's mutated into the ratings hungry monsters we have to deal with in 2016.

(For the record, while I support what Woodward and Bernstein did, in most cases, I'm not a big fan of the media and what it's turned into.)

So, what does a cake have to do with the biggest scandal in our nation's history?

Nothing.

Bet you didn't see that coming, did you?

Jane's Indian Pudding

A colonial classic that's become a bit hard to find!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Although Thanksgiving isn't usually my favorite holiday, I have a special extra long post for you today, featuring the comeback of a traditional family holiday dish and a trip to none other than Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts! Hosting the post today will be Jane, my custom character from the 17th century.

Again, Jane is actually from Jamestown in about 1614, so she predates the Pilgrims by six years and probably would never have even thought to visit New England. But since I live here, I've been having a lot of fun going to different historical sites that celebrate and educate people about the very early days of European colonization of North America. And while we've got a lot of different places to visit, one of the best is Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Plimoth Plantation is much like Colonial Williamsburg and other living history museums, with costumed interpreters and regular staff members happy to tell you all about the early days of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag. I hadn't been since I was very small, and honestly all I really remember of it was speaking to a Pilgrim about... something in their garden, and being miserably, miserably hot. Needless to say, I was excited to see it from an adult perspective.

Of course, part of this trip was also to do a little bit of research into Indian pudding, a Thanksgiving staple of my mom's family that has, for whatever reason, fallen out of favor. But more on that in a little bit! First, we're taking a trip back in time...

Addy's Apple Pudding

A really interesting hybrid of two popular pies!

Despite my enthusiasm for the Boston Red Sox, I am not actually a sports fan in the slightest, and yet I somehow am being forced to watch the Super Bowl. Or the "Big Game", I don't know if the NFL will come hunt me down if I call it by its proper name over here.

The one good thing that came of this is that I had lots of people over to taste test some new recipes, and this one in particular I think was a hit. It's very similar to the sweet potato pudding I made for Addy at Christmastime in terms of construction, but since the recipe treats it more like a pie, it actually has a lot more in common with a pumpkin pie than what we'd think of as a pudding. It was a nice, low key dessert to make, especially so soon after making the nian gao, and while it's definitely not a traditional sports party treat, I still think we made a good choice in deciding to give it a shot.

Addy's Sweet Potato Pudding

A super tasty historic dish that you've definitely got to try!

Next up on our holiday adventure is Addy! Like most of the other original (or at least, pre-2011) historicals, Addy has a well defined holiday story and an easily identified dish to prepare, and I have to say, hers was the one I was most curious to try.

I don't make puddings often unless it's the kind from a box, and the last pudding I made wasn't exactly tasty. I was also curious to see if it would taste anything like the sweet potato pies I made a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only was this not a terrible failure, but also was incredibly tasty without just tasting like the pie without a crust. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot if you're looking for something super tasty that doesn't often make its way onto modern tables or menus, and it's easy enough to make that I feel very confident in saying this is an official American Girl recipe that's a real winner.

Marie-Grace's Bourbon Bread Pudding

Bringing a taste of New Orleans to the holiday season!

Now, I will be the first to tell you that I enjoyed Marie-Grace and Cécile's books quite a bit, and I definitely don't think the series should be overlooked just because American Girl picked a pretty obscure point in history to focus on. However, when it came to picking out what to feature with them for the holidays, I found myself shaking my fist in frustration that they didn't have a book focusing on how people in 1853 New Orleans celebrated Christmas. Meet Cécile starts at the end of the Christmas season, with Cécile and her mother taking down their Christmas tree and Cécile commenting on some of the things she looks forward to and enjoys during the holiday season, and Cécile's Gift ends in mid December, and there isn't much focus on what the two girls' families are doing to prepare for Christmas because they're all much more focused on finding ways to help people affected by the Yellow Fever epidemic. Obviously, this is a more important topic for the series itself, but when you compare it to the other girls having books that very clearly detail how their families celebrate winter holidays and traditions, it was sort of a bummer to not be able to immediately turn to the book or the collection and find lots and lots of inspiration there.

Obviously, that doesn't mean I gave up. After a lot of consideration, I decided to make a bread pudding for Marie-Grace, and a very different, equally tasty treat for Cécile, which you'll hopefully hear about tomorrow! I'd never even had bread pudding before making this recipe, and I was very pleasantly surprised by what we ended up with.

Felicity's Pumpkin Pudding

An easy, authentic dish with a pretty unusual texture!

I'm taking advantage of my free time this week to get as many recipes in as I can before next week. Between Thanksgiving and the fact that I will probably be working on Black Friday, I seriously doubt I'm going to have a lot of time to spend on the blog. One dish I knew I wanted to make before November was over was pumpkin pudding, with a recipe straight from Felicity's Cook Book! 

While pumpkins ripen in fall and historically could keep in cellars throughout the winter, lately, it seems like pumpkin is the flavor of late September through November, and then is quickly replaced by peppermint. Seriously, it's a little bit frightening how many pumpkin and peppermint themed things people have come up with. Anyway, I figured in keeping with recent tradition, I should try to get this in before the end of the month, and fortunately, I did!