Sweet Sally Lunn...

OK, sorry about the late update...

But I have been on a path of self-discovery. All it took was one eighteenth century meal to get the ball rolling, and suddenly I have found my inner baker.

So...What did I cook? With a little help from the Colonial Williamsburg website which provides a list of old recipes that have been rewritten to make it easier for a twenty-first century amateur chef, I made a delicious, creamy peanut soup. I had remembered this soup from my honeymoon to Colonial Williamsburg and was a little anxious about being able to pull it off. I shouldn't have been. The recipe proved to be so easy that the only complaint that I - or my family- had was that it should have been the main course. But it wasn't.

For the main course, I decided to be more adventurous. I actually found a great website that gives a food timeline with plenty of links to old - I mean old by over two hundred years - cookbooks. I became intrigued. I pored over recipes for days until I found the first cookbook written by an American in America. Huh....What a great place to start... The recipes proved to be easier than I suspected. Nothing too complicated about boiling chicken. Of course, I found the instructions on how to choose the perfect chicken to butcher a little hard to follow. I moseyed to my local Publix and grabbed the first package of cut up whole chicken pieces that I could find. But the celery sauce that was poured over the chicken turned out to be a hit with my family. My son asked for seconds...and thirds...That is really something for a three year old who barely eats any vegetable that isn't okra. (Hey, we do live in the South...) I found the recommendation to garnish with bacon and lemon slices charming...and a nice culinary touch. Once again, I substituted pork bacon with turkey bacon because...well, pork doesn't quite fit on a kosher diet.

The rest of the meal turned a little more mid-nineteenth century as I tried my hand at creamed squash and homemade salad dressing. I found that salads were so commonplace in colonial America that the recipes given for them were a little hard to find. In fact, while I found mention of these elusive eighteenth century sides, I couldn't find a single recipe. Looks like I need to search a little harder. The "French" dressing that I finally settled on appeared in several cookbooks written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It lacked any resemblance to the French dressing on Walmart's shelves, but turned out to be very simple to make. The creamed squash...let me just say that next time, I will follow instructions a little better. I absolutely will pick my squash from my garden in the early morning. The cookbook suggested that squash picked at that time is less tough with smaller seeds. It's worth a try...And I will invest in a good collander to press the mashed squash through so that I can get rid of some of the ubiquitous seeds. Other than that, it turned out pretty well.

Of all of the things that I made, however, the bread turned out to be the crowd favorite - forcing me to reproduce several loaves over the next couple of weeks. I looked to Colonial Williamsburg once again to find the perfect recipe for a loaf of Sally Lunn, a sweet Southern treat brought here from England. Of course, there are conflicting views as to the bread's origin, but one can hardly mull those over once the sweet, light texture of the bread takes over the senses. The smell is maddening, and the taste can spoil your tastebuds forever. I have had limited success in baking bread before, but this was so easy that it boosted my baking confidence.

All it took was a couple of loaves of hot, buttered Sally Lunn to build up my baking muscles and start me off on the quest to bake. My husband has informed me that he hopes this is more than a short term fling into the baking world. I have churned out pretzels, bagels, loaves of white bread, pita bread, and even a baguette in the past couple of weeks. Not to mention rugelach cookies and meringues.

It's going to take a lot more than a few baked goods to transform me into a housewife that my ancestors' could be proud of, but I need a starting place somewhere. I've been looking for a hobby, anyway. And...as I survey my growing belly and bare feet, I realize that I just may have found the perfect one. This morning, as usual, I am barefoot, pregnant, and ...in the kitchen. Hmmm...wonder what I'll bake today?...