I am sorry if this was covered before , but I have a question : there are many fantastic recipes here on this forum and many fine cooks follow them and proclaim "here is an authentic XXXX" . what do you use for ingredients ? a simple recipe that calls for flour and sugar for example ?
I am not an expert but I believe Before 1870 there was only stone ground wheat ? not the white bleached flour we know and buy today . Sugar has changed much since the 1860's .
In 1860 they did not have the nice controlled ovens and stoves we have today - how do you truly make an authentic item ?
thanks in advance for your answers and knowledge .
That really is a problem and depends on the individual's personal philosophy.
Flour--there are some special flours you can order online, to get unbleached white, that kind of thing. There was white flour--Sylvester Graham had complained loudly about its lack of nutrition in the early 19th cenutry--so there was also whole wheat flour. Both were typically made of soft wheat, either winter or spring depending where you lived. Soft wheat is hard to get in anything other than a pastry sort of grind, rather than a normal grind. Most flour is a mix. You'd need to look into that. But Mediterranean wheat was the big wheat in the middle part of the US, long awns, winter, red, soft wheat, so that would be an ideal goal. But one might also find other flours sold under names--cracker flour, pastry flour, pasta flour, etc. that might meet one's needs.
Sugar--once it was added to a recipe, it performs much like period flour, as far as I know, but I have not studied cane varieties, so I may have missed a lot. If you're demonstrating the cooking process, you might need to look for or make a sugar loaf, or a brown flour of a certain consistency. But if you're only wanting the result, that doesn't matter. The white granulated flour won't be in a loaf shape anymore.
One thing to note--powdered sugar shows up in some period recipes, but they don't mean anything special, so use granulated sugar. All they mean is sugar that's not in a loaf. The loaf is that big cone-shaped thing wrapped in bluish-purple paper, and that's how you'd buy sugar at the store, unless you wanted to pay extra for coffee sugar and get it pounded or granulated.
Brown sugar was generally put in a barrel and shipped that way, and you'd get some out. There were various kinds, as there were various kinds of molasses, and we're generally getting some of the nicest kinds today.
As far as ovens and such--that's an interested philosophical problem. If a dozen cooks in the period followed a recipe and each baked it slightly differently based on their kitchen and choice and experience, those would all be period, by defiition. So there's no single correct period cake, or whatever is being made. Personally, I think that leaves open a parameter of accurate cakes. If it's within what a cook would have done in the period, it's accurate, and so is the cake baked somewhat differently following the same instructions.
Once one has learned the different ingredients and how to read period recipes, and decided what's available and where you've decided to call it "good enough" on the authenticity scale, then it becomes pretty easy and more fun at that point. Also sometimes you can try things and decide if they matter. The vast majority of heirloom vegetables from our garden (way back when we had one) didn't really matter. Didn't taste much different. Main difference was the parsnips--much sweeter when they got a nice freeze in the ground. Also, perfectly fresh things out of season were different--potatoes or cabbage or apples or onions stored late, start changing a bit, whereas today they're always perfectly "in season."
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