Historical Culinary Reconstruction of quindiniacks - partnered with Isabella Lores-Chavez. More field notes are recorded on her page.

Notes on the presentation:
I. The Recipe
1. What are quindiniacks?

• Before we started in on our recipe, we need to figure out what exactly we were meant to be making and tried to find out what a quindiniack was, and if it had some similarities to anything in the modern day
• Historian Jill Norman notes in her edited version if John Nott’s Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary from 1726, that the term “quindiniack” is an earlier version/spelling of a “quiddany” in Europe. A quindiniack was a type of fruit preserve poured into a mould and therefore shaped. They were most commonly made with plums, raspberries, cherries, apricots, or apples.
• Joseph Shipley’s “Dictionary of Early English” describes a quiddany as a “thick fruit jelly-- thicker than a syrup… and not so thick or stiff as a marmalade.” (546)
• Both Shipley and Norman note that alternate terms used to describe the same dessert include: quiddanet, quince paste, codigny, etc.
• In John Nott’s cookbook, he includes as recipe for a “Quiddany of Plums” that is very similar to our own sixteenth century for making quindiniacks.
• Sir Hugh Platt’s Delights for Ladies from 1600 also includes a recipe for making “Quidini of Quinces”

2. What is a pipkin?

• Food historian Ken Albala tells us in “Cooking as Research Methodology” that a pipkin is “a round-bottomed bulbous pot with a narrow shoulder, slight flaring rim, three small legs, and a hollow handle.”
• Albala goes on to describe how examples of pipkins survive in museums, but cannot be readily acquired today, so he actually made one himself for his reconstruction of a “Smeared Rabbit” recipe.
• The image on the right is actually a picture of the pipkin during Albala’s Smeared Rabbit reconstruction.
• We, of course, did not have this option, and although I looked for quick ways to acquire an earthenware unglazed pipkin--or even just an unglazed earthenware pot!--online, none of the options were within our monetary or temporal budget.
• From Albala’s writings about pipkins, we learned about its most important function: as a vessel for slow cooking, evenly heated. We were also reassured that using a modified vessel didn’t absolutely compromise that function: the pipkin’s legs are meant “to hold the pot evenly over the coals so it will not tip over” and its hollow handle allowed the cook to stick a rod into it and lift it out of the fire.

3. Misc

• Note that the recipe does not go into what kind of wood one might use to make a mold; assumes prior understanding of making wooden molds for consumables.
• The recipe also does not specify what the heat source may actually be; only references fire once. Pipkins were used to cook in coal fires, so for the recipe author, the mention of the pipkin suffices as an indication of the appropriate heat source.
• We looked up the word “claret” because it’s used to describe the color of the liquid in the pot. Claret is a red wine of a deep purplish-red color.

II. Components
1. Pippins

• A quick search for pippins online turned us on to the fact that pippins are in fact a type of apple that are extremely good for baking
• Jonathan Sauer’s “Historical Geography of Crop Plants” describes pippins as having been brought from France to England in the early sixteenth century
• We wanted to get an apple that was as close to the type that they might have used in that time period, so we tried to acquire “Newtown pippins,” a clone of the original pippin apples brought to the US in the eighteenth century.
• There are few orchards that still grow these apples, but a number of growers in NY listed the apple as among those that they cultivate
• These apples are described as having a “sweet, slightly spicy flavor and a crisp, but juicy, texture” (Our Everyday Life.com)
• One of the places that grows the apples happened to be Samascott Orchards, a company that comes to the farmer’s market on 114th street on Thursdays
• Unfortunately, when I got there and did not see them on display, the people working, who pick the apples at the orchard, informed me that pippins are not in fact in season yet (usually in the late fall/early winter only), so we discussed which apple varieties might be most similar to the taste and texture of the Newtown pippin and settled on the Alpert apple

2. Pipkin

• Having understood that we could not acquire an actual pipkin, we set out to find an earthenware pot of a similar size. None of the stoneware we looked at was available unglazed. This is a reflection of a cooking practice of our time: glazed stoneware is used for baking, and the stovetop cooking over an open flame only happens with metal pots.
• We bought a glazed stoneware pot with handles. Because it is glazed stoneware, we knew we could not nestle it into a coal fire without running a real risk of the pot cracking or worse, shattering. Instead, we planned a procedure for warming it before subjecting it to heat from a small open flame on the stovetop.
• Thus, this is by far the most anachronistic or imperfect portion of our reconstruction. In order to do justice to this discrepancy, we discussed, throughout our process, how an actual pipkin might change the process and results.
• Our pot did well, however. We put the pot in the oven (heated to 300 degrees) for 30 minutes, to warm it up and avoid thermal shock caused by a cold glazed stoneware pot coming into contact with an open flame.
• Our assemblage of stovetop grates--henceforth the FIRE TOWER--was an additional way for us to keep the pot away from direct contact with an open flame, while still simulating steady heat (an approximation of the way it would be heated by coals).

3. Making Quindiniacks
Here is our recipe rewritten in more modern English, which we can return to later if there’s time. We’ll launch right into our reconstruction!

We then followed the recipe! [Pictures]
A) Paring, cutting, and submerging the apples.

• Paring is virtually synonymous with peeling. We peeled the apples with a peeler, understanding of course that an early modern cook would have used a knife to the exact same end.
• We cut the apples into slices and submerged them as much as we could in the pot. The pot was too small to accommodate the 2 pounds the recipe calls for, so we were mindful of that quantity modification as we proceeded.
• The apples floated more than we expected them to, so some of them were never fully submerged. This is an example of when a pipkin could potentially do the job more properly--but apples are quite buoyant and float in water. Despite not being fully submerged, they did soften thoroughly after sitting in the pot for an hour; they were “boiled tender,” as the recipe described.
• As the water boiled, the apples were pushed further out of the water, even pulsing a little bit at the center of the heap, moved by the apples underneath really cooking in the water. The pot produced a distinctly fragrant smell--like apple cider.

B) Add sugar to the liquid and boil it, covered.

• Once we determined that the apples on the top were sufficiently tender, we removed them from the water using a fork to strain the chunks as best we could
• We then needed to add sugar. The recipe called for adding half a pound of sugar for each pint of liquid left behind, which meant that we needed to know how much liquid was actually in the makeshift pipkin
• [NEXT SLIDE] In order to ascertain how much liquid we had, we first poured a measured cup of water into a mug and marked the line at which it rose to in the mug; we decided to use this method because we were not sure what would happen to a plastic measuring cup with very hot liquid inside of it.
• The mug method showed us that there was in fact a cup of liquid inside our pot and we measured the sugar amount added accordingly.
• Once the sugar was added, we placed a cover on the pot and put it back on the fire tower on low heat, since the recipe indicated that we should let it boil “leasurably… being close covered.”

C) Boil the sugar-liquor mixture to thickness of jelly

• About an hour after setting the sugar-liquor mixture to boil, we saw it darken to a red color and uncovered it.
• We decided to turn up the heat slightly, as the recipe indicated we let it boil as fast as possible.
• 30 minutes later, we inserted a spoon into the mixture and found that it had certainly thickened, and what emerged on the spoon was a glistening kind of jelly with a rosy color. We tested the mixture on the back of a spoon to determine if it was time to take it off the fire: we laid a drop on the spoon, and although it seemed runny as we dropped it onto the spoon, it quickly stiffened. We determined that it felt stiff enough to be jelly-like, while still remaining squishy and sticky. Its rosy color was even more noticeable as a drop on the back of the spoon, and we could see some bubbles inside.
• When we took it off the heat, the mixture was still bubbling intensely: the surface was covered in lively bubbles. 3 minutes later, as it cooled, the bubbles had already diminished significantly.

D) Let cool and pour into moulds

• While we let the mixture cool, we wet the tin moulds that would be used to shape our quindiniacks. If the moulds had been made of wood, similar to the pictured quince paste mould from before, the moulds would have needed to be boiled first; since ours were tin, they only needed to be wet
• We were unsure of how we we should make the moulds-- we did not understand the purpose of the water (whether it was to ensure that the mixture did not stick to the sides of the mould, or something else), and this might have helped us to better understand how wet we should make the moulds themselves
• After the tin moulds were wet and the mixture in the pot has cooled slightly, after approximately 5 minutes, we poured the mixture in each of the moulds
• We were also unsure of the necessary thickness of the moulds, so we poured the mixture about halfway in each tin
• The first pour of the mixture was very smooth and resulted in a product that was fairly clear and with very few bubbles within it
• [NEXT SLIDE] Each successive pour felt more “chunky” and less smooth, and the third and four “prints” had a number of bubbles, foam, and pieces of burnt sugar
• It seemed that the sugar placed into the pot had burned at the bottom, and parts of the burnt sugar had gotten into the rest of the mixture.

E) Questions