Tag Archives: history

11/12/2011 · 10:02 pm

Decorating the Christmas Cake

Once your Christmas cake is nicely matured and well-fed on brandy, it is time to decorate the bugger. In my opinion it is best to go all-or-nothing; either don’t decorate at all or go crazy. Traditionally, in England at any rate, you need a layer of marzipan and a layer of royal icing. Though I have seen recipes that have a bakeable marzipan and no icing, which I must admit is attractive, but I keep it traditional, even though I am not really bothered about the icing. No, I do it simply for tradition’s sake.

I gave the Christmas cake recipe that I use in the previous post, so if you have made one or have a bought undecorated one that you want to put your own stamp on, I have recipes for marzipan and for royal icing too. Don’t forget to add some festive bits and bobs too.

Marzipan

Marzipan is essentially a paste made of ground almonds and sugar and it found its way in Europe from the Middle East via the Crusades. It was the Italians – specifically the Milanese – that really took to the stuff, refining the techniques to produce a very high quality product that was excellent for making into extravagant sculptures. Leonardo da Vinci was quite despondent after making some amazing and intricate marzipan sculptures for the Milanese court as he ‘observed in pain that [they] gobble up all  the sculptures I give them, right down to the last morsel.’

Aside from being used as a sculpture material, marzipan also became a popular sweetmeat used by chocolatiers and bakers. Some of my favourite cakes use marzipan: Battenburg, stollen and simnel cake. The Christmas cake got its layer of marzipan because the Twelfth Night cake – traditionally covered in it – was banned by the Puritan and Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell as too frivolous, so people added the marzipan they loved so much to their Christmas cake instead.

Here’s the recipe I always use these days. What I like specifically about this recipe is that it is not too sweet, which I think the bought stuff always is. Also, when you make your own marzipan, it has a much better texture as well as flavour. You can add extra things to the mixture if you like, such as the grated zest of an orange, or a couple of teaspoons of orange flower water or rose water.

140 g icing sugar

90 g caster sugar

220 g ground almonds

1 beaten egg

1 tbs apricot jam

1 tbs water

Sieve the icing sugar into a large bowl and stir in the caster sugar and almonds. Stir in the beaten egg and lemon juice to form a paste. Knead the marzipan on a surface floured with icing sugar. Easy. Wrap and allow to chill in the fridge for a few hours.

To cover the cake with it, you first need to slice the top of your cake off so that it is a nice, flat surface. I always like that bit because I get to try the cake.

Next, turn it upside down and pop it on a cake base or plate. Warm up the jam and water in a pan and paint the whole cake with the glaze.

On a sheet of greaseproof paper, roll out a little over half of the marzipan into a round shape that is just a little larger than the cake itself. The greaseproof paper makes it easier to roll out, but you can use an icing sugar dusted worktop instead. Use the cake tin as a template and cut a circle.

Pick up the marzipan still stuck to the paper, place it on top of the cake and peel off the paper.

Next, take the remaining third of the paste and roll that out into strips the same height as the cake and secure them to the cake. Press the edges together as you go as well as any cracks that may appear.

You need to leave the cake for a couple of days to dry a little before adding the icing (should you want to).

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Royal Icing

Royal icing is the classic icing for the Christmas cake – it is ‘royal’ because it was the British Royal Family that used in for their wedding cakes, and naturally if the Royals did it, then we copied it. Icing had been around since the eighteenth century; before that, there wasn’t the technology to refine the sugar appropriately. The first icing was similar to royal icing, it was spread over the top of the cake but then the cake was returned to the oven to set hard. The final result was a nice flat, shiny surface like that of a frozen lake, hence we call the stuff icing. Elizabeth Raffald mentions it in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) – the first written recording of the word.

Royal icing is the most popular icing because it can be piped and coloured easily. Plus it is easy to make , which a bonus. Here’s how:

2 medium egg whites

2 tsp lemon juice

500g icing sugar, sieved

Whisk the egg whites until frothy but not yet stiff and then stir in the lemon juice. Add icing sugar to the egg white bit by bit, mixing as you go – an electric beater comes in very handy here, but you can use a wooden spoon if your forearms are up to the job. The icing can be used straight away.

Spread the mixture all over the cake using a palette knife to smooth it out. Dipping the knife in very hot water is a good way of getting the icing super-smooth, but I like it a bit more rough-and-ready. You can reserve some of the icing for piping of course, but that has never really been my thing – I should have a go one time though!

A simple and effective way of decorating the cake is to use the side of a knife to make a nice spiky snow effect. When decorated, leave it for two or three days to set hard.

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03/12/2011 · 7:34 pm

Traditional Mincemeat

To kick off the Christmas theme for December, I thought I would give you a couple of mincemeat recipes – one sixteenth and one nineteenth century. They cenrtainly different from the Robinson’s jarred stuff my Mum used when I was a child. Robinson’s were a strange brand of preserves with a ‘Golly’ mascot that was still being used in the 2000s. It’s a long story of how this was allowed that requires a whole entry to itself I think…

Modern day mincemeat is a preserve of sugar, dried fruits, nuts and suet used to fill mince pies. It is certainly in no way meaty. In fact, I think vegetarian suet used these days. The further back you travel in time however, the more meaty the recipes become. Originally, the idea was to make a pie filled with minced meat, heavily flavoured with spices and dried fruits. There were two main reasons for this; first it allowed one to show off about how much spice one could afford; and second, the sweet aromatics could overpower any meat that was past its prime. To show you what I mean, here’s how ‘to bake the humbles of a deer’ from The Good Housewife’s Jewel by Thomas Dawson from 1598 (the humbles are the innards by the way):

Mince them very small and season them with salt and pepper, cinnamon and ginger, and sugar if you will, and cloves, mace, dates, and currants and, if you will, mince almonds, and put unto them. When it is baked you must put in fine fat, and sugar, cinnamon and ginger and let it boil. When it is minced put them together.

The last sentence is puzzling, but it seems to be a recipe that is possible to do these days, though in sixteenth century cook books there are never quantities mentioned.

The same cannot be said for the next recipe from Mrs Isabella Beeton. Mrs Beeton was the first recipe writer to have the great idea of listing the ingredients and the quantities before the recipe. In her magnum opus of 1888, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, she included  recipes for a regular one, an American one and an ‘excellent’ one. I have never tried the latter two recipes, but the regular one makes the best mince pies I have ever eaten in my life, so if you are thing of making your own mincemeat I urge you to give this one a go. It does contain beef which shouldn’t put you off as you can’t taste it, but it does give it amazing delicious qualities. The quanitities Mrs Beeton gives are huge, so it is best to half or even quarter them. Here they are:

2 lbs raisins

3 lbs currants

1 1/2 lbs of lean beeef such as rump

3 lbs of suet – fresh is best, put the packet stuff is also good

2 pounds of soft dark brown sugar

6 oz mixed candied citrus peel (cintron, lemon, orange &c)

1 nutmeg, grated

2 lbs of tart apples such as Cox’s Orange pippins, peeled, cored and grated

the zest of 2 lemons and the juice of one

1/2 pint of brandy

Mince the beef and suet (or get your butcher to do it).

Then, mix all the remaining ingredients together well and pot into sterilised jars, making sure you push it down well to exclude any trapped air bubbles. Leave for at least 2 weeks before you use it. In a couple of weeks, I’ll give you recipe to make the perfect mince pie…

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15/11/2011 · 8:58 pm

What is a pudding?

If you are British and trying to explain the word to a non-Brit the answer is surprisingly difficult. In America, it is a simple answer: a dessert. We all use pudding to mean dessert or afters, but then there are types of dessert that are true puddings. The true puddings are those that are boiled or steamed. Christmas puddings, suet puddings and sponge puddings fit into this category. In fact, anything boiled or steamed in a basin, cloth or handy piece of intestinal tract is a pudding: black pudding, white pudding, steak & kidney pudding, pease pudding and haggis are the ones that immediately spring to mind. So far, so good. However, there is the odd miscellaneous pudding: Yorkshire puddings aren’t boiled, they are baked beneath the roast beef in the oven.

‘Mixing the Pudding’

So, a pudding is any dessert, or the name for the dessert course. Aside from the proper puddings mentioned above, there are some that go under a false name: bread and butter pudding, sticky toffee pudding and Eve’s pudding are examples of this. Why are these puddings and, say, an apple pie not called an apple pie pudding?

I only realised just how complicated a question ‘What is a pudding?’ is when talking about food with my American friends. All these diverse puddings (whether by my own classification true ones or not) must have some common ancestor. What was the first pudding? To answer this question I needed to hit the historical cookbooks.

I had mentioned in a previous post on the subject of dumplings a little while back that the pudding is a descendant of the dumpling. This was the claim made in 1726 by Thomas Gordon and Henry Carey. They said that dumplings became larger and larger that they had to tied up in a cloth, thus creating the pudding. However, I am not too sure about this claim. Elizabeth Raffald gives plenty of recipes for dumplings in her book from 1769 that are large and therefore require a cloth, but she calls them dumplings (a recipe for sparrow dumplings is in this post). Was the word pudding around a long time before this?

Mr Samuel Whiskers  and Anna-Marie stitch Tom Kitten up a treat in

The Roly-Poly by Beatrix Potter

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Going back almost 200 years I have found recipes for puddings that take two distinct forms. In The Good Housewife’s Jewel from 1596, Thomas Dalton gives recipes for familiar puddings like black pudding and haggis, but he also gives recipes for puddings that are baked, such as the ‘pudding of a calves chaldron’ or the ‘pudding in a pot’. He also makes reference to making puddings in the bellies of animals such as coney and carp. It is interesting that none of the puddings are desserts, though they do contain many spices such as cloves, mace and ginger as well as dried fruits such as currants, plus sugar. They must have been very expensive to make in the late sixteenth century – to give some perspective in 1596 Elizabeth I was on the throne and the first production of The Merchant of Venice was put on at The Globe theatre. Back in the day there was no such thing as a first course, a second course and so on, at least how we know them; everything was just sent out together. So having sweetly spiced meat puddings would not have seemed strange. We don’t eat food like that anymore, except for the single survivor of this branch of the puddings – the Christmas Pudding.

[See this future post, however, for a correction]

The earliest description of the word pudding I could find is in the Bibliotheca scholastica from 1589. There is no real definition here, but examples of puddings and things associated with them. They all seem to be the kind made by stuffing intestines with various fillings. There are some interesting terms though: there was a pudding only eaten at funerals called a murtatum that was flavoured with myrtle berries, and a pudding-maker was called a silicernium.

In fact the earliest puddings do seem to be essentially sausages, so it seems our friends Messrs Gordon and Carey were probably incorrect. Though they were right about one thing: the pudding is certainly a British invention that was developed from the sausages the Romans brought into the country in the first century BC. The word pudding comes from the Latin word botellus, which means literally sausage; the French word boudin has the same root.

So there you go, a pudding was originally a boiled sausage, but selection throughout time has evolved them radially into a huge range of foods, both sweet and savoury and as far as I know, there isn’t a single one I don’t like. Usually I try to give an exhaustive list of dishes, but the list would probably go on for ever if I use the word pudding in its broad sense; therefore I’m just going to list the kind that I consider the true puddings, i.e. the boiled or steamed ones. Hopefully I’ll provide the histories and recipes for them. Of course, if I have missed any puddings out please let me know. I’m sure there are some glaringly obvious ones that I have forgotten. Okay, here we go:

Those boiled in intestines:

Black pudding

White pudding

Haggis

Those that are steamed in a basin and are savoury:

Steak, kidney and oyster pudding

Minted lamb pudding

Pork and apple pudding

Leek and onion pudding

Mutton, apple and raisin roly-poly

Mussel and leek roly-poly

Pease pudding

Those that are steamed in a basin and are for afters:

Christmas pudding

Jam roly-poly

Spotted Dick

Sussex pond pudding

Steamed sponge pudding

Sticky toffee pudding

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03/11/2011 · 9:16 pm

Remember remember the fifth of November…

 

Remember, remember the fifth of November,

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.

We see no reason

Why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

On the fifth day of November 1605, after an anonymous tip-off, a man was found in the House of Lords keeping watch over 36 barrels of explosives. That man was of course Guy Fawkes, the most famous of the thirteen Catholic conspirators who attempted to assassinate King James I of England and VI of Scotland.

King James I of England & VI of Scotland

They were not doing out of sheer spite, you understand, in fact they had pretty good reason to do it. James was a Protestant, as was Elizabeth I before him. Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, after becoming sick of being told what to do by the Roman Catholic Church, essentially created Protestantism so he could do anything – or anyone – he liked. This made him the Head of the Church rather than the Pope – something that still exists to this day. In fact, it will be this year – 2011 – where a long-time law will eventually be dropped allowing members of the royal family to marry Roman Catholics. Anyway to be Catholic was to be hated – you had no few rights and any public servant or member of the Church Office had to swear an allegiance to the Church of England. Several attempts to assassinate the monarch previously had been unsuccessful, but the Gunpowder Plot was the closest anyone had ever got to getting the job done.

A contemporary depiction of some of the conspirators

Guy Fawkes is the third from the right

Guy Fawkes may be the best known of the conspirators, but he was certainly not the ringleader – that was a man called Robert Catesby. No, Fawkes was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and because he was caught red-handed, it was he that was made an example of. Even though he was caught and arrested, he only confessed to the full crimes after three days of torture. Eights of the conspirators were caught and hung, drawn and quartered.

Fawkes’s signature before torture…

…and after.

Of course anyone who was a Protestant celebrated this fact and it soon became customary to build bonfires on the fifth of November and in its early days it was used as another excuse to persecute any Catholics that may be living in your neighbourhood. However, the decades and centuries passed, and for most people Guy Fawkes Night is simply a great British custom where we get to huddle round a big bonfire, set off our fireworks – and most important of all – eat some food.

British celebrations always have feasts, or at least certain foods, associated with them and Bonfire Night is no exception. It may not have a very long list, but they are some of the most delicious foods. I think it is because it is associated with cosiness – big coats, big scarves and big hunks of cake and toffee, all washed down with a big mug of tea.

One of the most exciting things for me as a child was baking potatoes in the bonfire. The potatoes were wrapped in aluminium foil and gingerly placed in the white-hot embers with the use of a stick and left there for an hour or so to cook before being fished out and eaten greedily with lots of melted butter. There is no better baked potato than a bonfire-baked potato let me tell you. If you are having a bonfire, give them a go, you will not be disappointed.

This time of year is the best for cakes and toffees – they are commonly heavily flavoured with black treacle and spices, all very provocative and medieval-feeling. The four that spring to mind are Yorkshire parkin, bonfire toffee, cinder toffee and toffee apples. It is these autumn and winter foods that I love the most, and miss the most. I am hunting down the ingredients to make some of these myself whilst I am here in the USA – the recipes will follow of course.

One last thing: if you are having a bonfire, don’t forget to check it before you light it, just in case a little hedgehog has made its little hibernation home in there. Roasted hedgehog should certainly not be on the menu…

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24/10/2011 · 12:14 pm

The Dumpling Eaters

For those of you not in the know, in England a dumpling is a small ball of suet dough that has been poached in water, milk, stock, soup or stew. Dumplings have been around for a while, and started life just a mixture of flour and water.

The Roman invasion force under Julius Caesar lands in Britain met by a horde of natives

by Mary Evans

During the Roman invasion and occupancy, somewhere around AD50, their own version of the dumpling was introduced that was made of lentils rather than flour. They didn’t catch on. As time passed, our own British dumpling began to get a little more complex: milk was added along with extra ingredients and became larger and larger until it had to wrapped in some cloth. It was at this point the pudding was born.  I’m not going to talk about puddings in this post as they need their own one themselves. The British then became famous for their puddings. The humble dumpling still remained very popular though and became quite upmarket in rich households: they were enriched with ingredients such as butter, bone marrow and sugar. Fresh and dried fruits were also popular.

King John signing the Magna Carta in Runnymede on 15th June 1215

King John (1166-1216), was a massive consumer of dumplings, and thought it necessary that on a Sunday every man in his court should breakfast on wine and dumplings. The king was advised by a Sir John and it was he who got King John into eating them. He was found out as a witch because he “had perform’d many Hellish and Diabolical Ceremonies”, including one that caused the king to think that the moon was made of green cheese. No-one seemed to blame the Magna Carta or the losing of the crown jewels on witchcraft though. His dumplings and puddings were so delicious that it was assumed that the reason for this but be that he was in league with the Devil. People soon realised it was because he put nice things in them, and forever onward, Sir John was named Sir John Pudding.

These two Johns were Dumpling Eaters according Messrs Thomas Gordon and Henry Carey in their bizarre essay from 1726: A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; Its Dignity, Antiquity and Excellence With a Word upon Pudding; and Many other Useful Discoveries, of Great Benefit to the Publick. Snappy title, eh? The original Dumpling Eaters, they say, were a race that split from the Romans during their British occupancy. When the Romans left, these Dumpling Eaters ‘wisely resolv’d never to go Home again’, because they had devoped such a taste for them. They spent their time eating many dumplings and worshipping the god Bacchus rather heavily, if you get my meaning.  The Dumpling Eater Doctrine was still around in the early eighteenth century, where they could be found in their club house where they would eat ‘not only Dumplings but Puddings; and those in no small Quantities’. What became of the Dumpling Eaters, I do not know. I do hope there still an Order of them around.

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There are many recipes for dumplings around, both sweet and savoury. I thought I’d share this recipe with you for wild mushroom dumplings which I made not too long ago. At my local Farmer’s Market, there was a stall selling locally picked mushrooms and I couldn’t resist. I had some duck stock that I had made in the freezer (see this post for recipe), so I thought I would make a nice clear duck soup into which I could poach my dumplings. I shall give some more recipes for dumplings as I find more recipes for them. The soup is of my own invention and the dumplings recipe comes from the always excellent Lyndsey Bareham.

For the soup

1 1/2 pints of duck stock

1 carrot, finely diced

a bay leaf

2 springs of fresh thyme

For the dumplings

2 oz self-raising flour

salt and pepper

1 oz suet

1 oz of wild mushrooms, finely diced

1 small shallot, finely diced

To make your duck stock clear, you need to clarify it. There are many ways to do this, but by far the easiest is to freeze it and then wrap it in a piece of muslin or a cloth and allow it to defrost slowly in the fridge.

You should find that the stock that comes out is perfectly filtered by the cloth. You’ll also be surprised at the solid bits left behind in the cloth.

Anyways, pour the stock into a pan along with the carrot, thyme and bay leaf. Bring to the boil and allow to simmer for around five minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

During the simmering time, whip up your mushroom dumplings: mix together all the ingredients in a bowl and mix in just enough water to make a soft dough.

Take pieces of dough and roll them into balls a little smaller than a walnut. Place the dumping in the simmering soup, turning up the heat so that they cook through. They should be done in no longer than 15 minutes.

Easy!

More dumpling recipes:

Horseradish Dumplings

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12/10/2011 · 6:36 pm

Ducks: A Potted History

Mary Simmons of Hartwell’s prize-winning Aylesbury ducks

Long before the chicken became the country’s favourite fowl for the dinner table, there was the duck. The Chinese domesticated it 4000 years ago and it is still their meat of choice. The Egyptians were not too far behind the Chinese; they captured eggs that were hanging about in nests amongst the reeds on the banks of the Nile. The duck truely is the “veteran of the henhouse”. Britain too did love its roast duck, though duck breeding did suffer greatly during the World Wars and never really recovered.

All farmed ducks today are all descended from the seemingly ubiquitous mallard. Farmed ducks and mallards differ greatly in size: farmed ducks are commonly double the size of their wild cousins and are often seen capturing and eating whole frogs in a single bite! Prior to domestication, many of the duck species that were caught and eaten were migratory, coming and going like clockwork as the seasons passed.  Heavy symbolism was therefore attached to the eating of them, and they were integrated into feasts. They are still eaten in Romania at the vernal equinox.

In Britain, the most well-known duck breeds are the Aylesbury and Gressingham, though they are by no means the most common. Many breeds dwindled in number so much that they went extinct, though some have been saved, such as the Silver Appleyard. The most common ducks that are reared for the table these days are the Pekin and Barbary ducks; the latter of the two must be rather stealthy as it is very common to see escapees hanging around ponds in Britain (and indeed the USA).

The Aylesbury Duck

When people think of British ducks, they think of the Aylesbury – with their gleaming white plumage, orange legs and feet and sturdy bill set high upon their skull. Even if one did not know of the Aylesbury duck, I am sure that this is the picture one would have in their head. Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck was an Aylesbury  for example (though she lived up North). Aylesbury ducks were not originally bred for their meat at all, but for their quills. In the nineteenth century, however, the switch was made. The reason being the folk of Aylesbury saw an opportunity to feed the ever-growing London population. Selling was successful – it must have been quite a sight to see the drovers walking the ducks from Aylesbury to London every week to be sold at market.

This seems all very picturesque, but in reality it was far from it. The ‘Duck End’ area of Aylesbury, where the ducks were bred was unsanitary, ducks were not kept in farms but were allowed to roam free, and taken into people’s homes at nighttime. However, Aylesbury’s attraction endured and conditions were better by the twentieth century. Then came The Great War, which damaged duck farming greatly and World War Two almost wiped it out completely. By the 1950s, there was just one significant flock of Aylesburys left and by 1966 there was no more breeding of Aylesbury ducks. Birds were often sold under the name Aylesbury, but they did not ‘contain a single Aylesbury gene’.

It is not all bad news though: some individuals did remain, though most had cross-bred with mallards. However, there was a large effort to bring back the breed and so the small mongrel population was selectively bred and we now have Aylesbury ducks once more.

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Duck Dishes

Ducks are no longer commonly eaten and are certainly considered a treat, save for special occasions. The most common way to eat them these days is by roasting them, though you can buy the breasts quite easily now, but for a large price – they are sometimes more expensive than the whole bird. Ducks were commonly simmered with herbs and vegetables, preserved in curative brines and, most bizarrely, sent through a press to make the infamously opulent dish duck in blood sauce. Anyway, below is a list of British duck dishes, some of which are rather old or obscure. I intend to tell you all about each one in separate posts, and hopefully I’ll be cooking most and providing recipes. I have also included some recipes outside of Britain that I think have influenced our cuisine in some way. Some I have already tackled as part of my other blog. Any that I have written up as a post will have a lovely link to send you straight to it. If there are any omissions, or you have your own recipe, let me know and I shall add them to the list. Here goes:

  1. Roast Duck
  2. Delia Smith’s duck with Morello cherries
  3. Duck with mint
  4. Stewed duck
  5. Duck stewed with green peas
  6. Duck terrine
  7. Fois gras
  8. Isle of Mann salt duck
  9. Duck baked in a salt crust
  10. Duck in blood sauce
  11. Confit of Duck
  12. Duck á l’orange
  13. Duck á la braise
  14. Duck á la mode

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25/07/2011 · 8:15 pm

God Bless Her, and all that Sail in Her

Queen Liz 2
“God bless her, and all that sail in her”

Well hello there. Welcome to my brand-spanking new weblog British Food: A History.

From my love of cooking and interest in history, I thought it best I should start this blog on all things British and culinary. This interest has not come from nowhere, I have another blog called Neil Cooks Grigson which tackles all the classic as well as many of the weird and forgotten English dishes throughout the last 700 years or so. The idea behind that blog was to cook all the recipes in Jane Grigson’s English Food, a truly excellent piece of writing.

So what does this new blog have to offer if I am already sort-of doing it on another?

Well, the answer is that the other blog will have glaring omissions because the book does. So I always originally intended to produce an English Food V2.0. However, the more I researched for posts, the more I got interested in old recipe books and the history surrounding them and found that, although a great deal of fun the other blog is, I wanted to cast my net even further with this one.

The amazingly talented Mrs Jane Grigson

I want to add the recipes Jane Grigson didn’t use, I want to add the best of the ones I have cooked from the book, more importantly I want to look more at Wales and Scotland. Not just that, but to extend the map to the other countries that have had links with my own – for better, or for worse – like Ireland, France, India and the countless other countries too that have moulded our people, culture and food throughout history. I also want to go back in time to Britain before the Middle Ages too. What influence did  the Roman occupation have, for example? What about further back to prehistory? How did farming come about in Britain and what did the foraging people eat before farming on any scale even occurred?

So, the blog will be a mix of recipes, findings and short essays on our amazingly rich, frequently odd and overwhelmingly dynamic the Britons have been – and still are – with their food.

Most intriguing of all though, is to find a recipe and cook it and really experience how people lived; reading about is of course wonderful fuel for the imagination and it allows us to understand our past, and therefore our present and future. As is watching film documentaries. But these all fail in that the experiences are all second-hand. For example, eating something that a king from the Middle Ages ate on his coronation, in my opinion, the closest you can get to climbing inside a time machine and transporting yourself there.

So, there you go, that’s the idea behind it all. Let’s just see if I can pull it off…

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