The 1912 Titanic Lemon Tart Recipe

If you haven't already read the first part of this story click here to go to: Part 1 This is a part of the Historical Food Fortnightly.

The Challenge: "Foods served at notable events in history Feb 22 - March 7
What kind of food was served at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth? What did Benjamin Franklin eat at the Constitutional Convention? Find a food item that was served at a notable event in history, research the recipe, and recreate the dish."

The Recipe:

The Date/Year and Region:  USA and UK 1912

How Did You Make It:

Ingredients: 

Filling:

- 1 Cup Sugar
- 2 Tablespoons Corn Starch
- 2 Eggs
- 1 Tablespoon Butter
- 1 1/2 Cups Boiling Water
- The juice and rind of one Lemon

Instructions:

Make your crust and let it chill. Rind and juice one lemon. Boil the water in a medium saucepan. Add sugar and corn starch. Let boil for five minutes. Remove from heat, add butter and lemon juice and rind. Temper the eggs by adding a bit of the hot mixture to the eggs a little bit at a time while whisking. Once warm add the egg mixture into the whole and put into a double boiler if necessary to thicken. Line your 8 inch tart pan with the dough, fill with the filling, add dough shapes to the top. Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown.   


Pie crust made of 1 pound butter, one pound flour and a little water.

Time to Complete: I felt like I was making it forever. A normal person might be able to make this in one hour.

Total Cost: Inexpensive, I had all of the ingredients except the lemon and sugar

How Successful Was It?: I don't generally like lemon but this tasted very good. When I first added the lemon I didn't think it was strong enough but once it cooled down it was lemony. My family ate it and that almost never happens.  

 How Accurate Is It?:I took a middle ground between the description of the Titanic Tart and the recipe I was following. It seems tarts don't typically have a top crust but the recipe called for adding fancy shapes out of dough on the top of the custard. The Titanic Tart had a top crust. In the recipe book, the "Lemon Tart" and "Lemon Pie" recipes were exactly the same with the exception the tart lacked the top crust.

Tart with a Questionable Personal History: The Titanic Lemon Tart

 This is going to be a long post, so anyone who wants to skip right to the recipe click here: Part 2

I was still in college when I read about the white whale of a tart. That devious, juicy, enticing tart shrouded in mystery. My life as a foodie was forever changed the day that I read that there was, still in existence, a tart that was baked on the Titanic. I kid you not.

The article I was reading was brilliant. It was about the various archival preservation methods for food artifacts. The little quip about the tart just casually tossed in there. I knew then that I would have to recreate this tart. I tried in vain to locate the tart or even another mention of it but found it was a ghost.

The first time I read it I had images in my head of a girl (who looked very much like my sister,) tiptoeing into the kitchen amidst the commotion, and tossing a tart and a few extra goodies in a folded piece of newspaper, and sliding them into her coat while being quickly ushered into a lifeboat. Later she is seen with a doughnut in her mouth as the terrified survivors watch the flares go up over the ship. And even though my sister responds to this anecdote with "Of course I'd get some food, you don't know how long you're going to be in that lifeboat! You could freeze or starve!" I realize this is an unlikely scenario for a tart, but it's the one I went with until I could figure out more logical origins.

I knew there was only one place to get some answers and I amazingly got in touch with Gary McGowan of Cultural Preservation and Restoration of New Jersey, who freeze dried the tart years ago. While he never further authenticated the provenance, he said that the woman who brought it in said that she inherited the family heirloom. "It was lovingly cared for in a little cardboard box and, because it was food, she was concerned about moisture having an ill effect on its stability," McGowan wrote in addition to nice description of the specimen "When I saw it, it was quite hard and almost petrified."

Could this thing be real or was this just a piece of conservationist lore? It was only purported to have been baked on Titanic. It didn't seem plausible that something baked on Titanic could have made it out but it turns out, there are a lot of ways an edible could have left the ship.

There were workers on Titanic for days before the ship sailed and the whole ship was tested to make sure everything was in good working order. The tart could have been baked as part of this test run.  It is also possible the tart escaped with one of the early cross channel passengers who disembarked in France and Ireland before the transatlantic voyage. Another plausible scenario is that the tart was mailed home. The R.M.S. part of R.M.S. Titanic stood for Royal Mail Steamer. There was a post office on board along with 7 million pieces of mail. Some of this mail was dropped off when the ship crossed the channel.

My top 3 candidates for smuggling the tart out are as follow:

1. Charles John Joughin. He was the Chef of the ship. In this scenario it would not be a tart baked on Titanic but a tart baked by the chef of Titanic. According to reports, this gentleman is noted for having been the last survivor to leave the ship and treading water for 2 hours before he was rescued. He stated that he barely felt the cold and was fine except for swollen feet. The interesting thing is that after he was saved he started a new life, in New Jersey. The same place that the tart resurfaced. 

2. Eileen Lenox-Collingham. This young girl of 11 was one of the cross channel passengers, of her trip on Titanic she had this to say "I remember vaguely, the enormous dining room. Of course, it was very exciting for us because in those days children led a very nursery life, we didn't have our meals with our parents; we had them in the school or nursery. And it was generally very plain food, I suppose, like milk pudding and rather dull things like that, so it was very exciting to have this elaborate food." She sounds exactly like I do when someone asks me about a trip. I give the food tour.


3. John Coffey. He was a stoker who was hired in the days before Titanic's voyage. He used the job as a free ride home to Queensland and snuck off the ship when they got there, hiding under the mail bags. One could only assume he packed a bit of food for his journey.

Is there any credence to the Titanic Tart? Is it just food myth? A good fake? We'll probably never know, unless you are the owner of this tart and want to get in touch with me. Are you a believer or not? Answer in the comments. 

So at the most this is a recreation of a foodie dream, and at the least it's a recreation of a REALLY old tart.

On to Part 2.

Civil War Era Rock Candy Recipe: Historical Food Fortnightly

"Our children eat crystallized sugar, under the name of rock candy, and we ourselves us it in the loaf crystallized in another form." -Friend's Intelligencer, 1859

For this Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge, I searched high and low in search of something blue. Blueberries were the obvious choice but unseasonal and disagreeable. I'm the only person in the world who doesn't like berries. I didn't think to make rock candy until a few days before the challenge ended, but I decided to make it anyway, even if it would be a week late.

 "Rock candy" was the name given to many different types of candies in the 1800s. One version of the candy, was a hardened syrup mixture, mixed with nuts and cut into pieces. Another form of rock candy was recrystallized sugar.  It was eaten plain, used in medicines, to flavor drinks, and as decoration for other edibles.

 

The Challenge: "Something Borrowed, Something Blue February 8 - February 21
It’s a two part challenge! Either create a dish that relies on borrowed ingredients, or create a dish that involves the color blue. Bonus points if you can achieve both!"

The Recipe: 

The Date/Year and Region: 1860s, Boston, although it's a simple, popular treat in use almost everywhere.

How Did You Make It:

Ingredients:

-3 Cups Sugar
- 1 Cup Water
-Essential Oil and Food Coloring Optional


Instructions:


Bring your sugar and water to a boil, stirring occasionally. As soon as it boils, remove from heat, let sit for a minute to cool and pour into sterilized glasses. Mix in coloring and flavor if desired. Tie a string onto a stick or pencil and lay the stick over the glass, inserting the string into the liquid, being sure that the string does not touch the bottom of the glass. Cover the glass with a cloth and let it sit for a week. If crystals form on the top of it, just break them into the mixture with a butter knife. At the end of a week, remove string, drain off the extra syrup and rinse the string rock candy and the rock candy in the glass off with water. Lay it out on a cookie sheet to dry.    

Time to Complete: 10 minutes of prep and cooking, 7 days to form.


Total Cost: Very inexpensive.

How Successful Was It?: Tastes delicious, I used a bit of Vanilla flavoring. I wish I made something else to put it on. It is very sweet.


How Accurate Is It?: The recipe called to bake the candy but I just let it air dry. It's blue, even though the recipe called for it to be a slate violet color, but I did borrow the glasses to make it in.

Secret Life of Bloggers Blog Party

 Cold wet and nasty has been the experience here the last few weeks. No one wants to leave their houses.

The construction on the roads mixed with the snow in my neighborhood is terrible. 

You know I live in Pennsylvania, right?

Lights in the slushy snow.

We are finally getting normal, light snow. For a while we were only getting slushy, wet snow that was impossible to move through.

Went out with the girls from dance class even though none of us wanted to leave the warm comfort of our houses.

We had a storm of 50 mph winds. Some of our electrical lines snapped and were making a whipping sounds in the wind. At 1 in the morning a tree fell on my neighbor's house, cutting the modular house into two, lengthwise. The young family; mom, dad, boy and girl all escaped with just scratches and bruises, the bulk of the tree, missing them by inches in their beds. We had a tree fall on our property last year as well but felt it was too negative to post about. You know that tree you've been meaning to get cut? Do it now.    

In another news, it's snowing again and it's looking like it will be another 4-5 inches.

Please be safe everyone. These storms, while lacking a lot of the snow of last winter, have still been very dangerous in terms of ice and wind.

History Timeline Community with Robert Diez

I was lucky enough to meet up with Robert Diez, the creator and curator of a facebook community page called History Timeline.

Robert Diez is a Costa Rican American reenactor who reenacts both the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. He was enamored by reenactors in the United States as a child but found that there was no reenacting in Costa Rica and related that they haven't even had a military since the 1940s. He was inspired by stories of family involvement in the war and wanted "to see what they saw."


 He started reenacting at the 150th Gettysburg and was featured in the book, Seething Hell, which will come out in September. He was inspired to create this page as a place to post relevant and quality content for reenactors and history people and spends 2 hours a day filling it with content. Much of his content comes from his friends on the battlefields like Garry Adelman (Gettysburg,) Austin Bradford (Gettysburg,) and Erik Dorr (Harper's Ferry.)   

Even though his English is not always good, he relates that it hasn't affected his reenacting and noted that even though the majority of foreign soldiers were German and Irish, that during the duration of the war 20,000 Hispanics and Latinos fought, appearing on both sides of the conflict.

If you don't already follow his fast growing page, head on over there and be sure to like it before it gets cool.

This is also a good time to go like me on facebook or connect with me on any of the following social media sites. 

Twitter: @WorldTUDown
Facebook
Google+
Instagram