Having Your Plate and Eating it too.

Earlier in the week we considered the lost art of picnic-catering. The idea of course at a well-catered anything is that the amount of food prepared is exactly right. This applies even more to picnic meals - because no-one likes waste, but it is tedious to have to re-pack previously transported food and carry it home again. What do you do about the other picnic accoutrements? Take paper plates and plastic cutlery and bin them on the way home? Or do the elegant thing and take the china and crystal and take it home (carefully) to wash and put it away?

For the ultimate in biodegradable picnic ware – next time why not consider taking edible plates? Any one of the flat breads or ‘wraps’ would work of course, but if picnic one-upmanship is your thing, you could make the white-glazed bread trenchers from Hannah Wooley’s [Woolley’s] book The Queen-like Closet, or, Rich Cabinet: stored with all manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery. Very Pleasant and Beneficial to all Ingenious Persons of the Female Sex.(1672)

To make white Trencher-Plates which may be eaten.
Take two eggs beaten very well, Yolks and Whites, two spoonfuls of Sack, one spoonful of Rosewater, and so much flower as will make it into a stiff Paste, then roule it thin, and then lay it upon the insides of Plates well buttered, cut them to fit the Plates, and bake them upon them, then take them forth, and when they are cold, take a pound of double refin’d Sugar beaten and searced, with a little Ambergreece, the White of an Egg and Rosewter, beat these well together, and Ice your Plates all over with it, and set them into the Oven again till they be dry.


Quotation for the Day.

I've liked lots of people 'til I went on a picnic jaunt with them.
Bess Truman.