Welcome to Season 2!! We're in the last slog of winter, and what could be better to take us through it than savory pie? But first, we test you by presenting the somewhat challenging history of savory pies. Birds do not get enough credit for their role in the history of savory pies. Maybe you're thinking we mean, like, chicken. As an ingredient. While that's true, it's just the tip of the birds-and-savory-pies-iceberg

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Sources:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/17/142460593/for-the-origins-of-pie-look-to-the-humble-magpie#:~:text=Hourly%20News-,For%20The%20Origins%20Of%20Pie%2C%20Look%20To%20The%20Humble%20Magpie,assembled%20ingredients%20for%20their%20pies.

https://www.madisoniannews.com/community/cultural-history-pie

https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/03/history-of-pie-how-savory-meat-pies-evolved-into-americas-favorite-dessert.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_pie

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d0orqm/why_did_savory_pie_culture_shepherds_pie_chicken/

Happy Holidays and Happy Season 1 Finale! We've officially brought our gingerbread house success rate up from 0% to 50%. In this episode, we share the history of gingerbread with each other and build a festive little house. We hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable winter holiday season, and we'll be back in 2025 for season 2! We've got a bonus episode coming on our patreon all about the Christmassy bakes in our families, and we'll have more bonus content and recipes coming in the new year.

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The most important part of this episode is the discussion of UK tax code. We get into confusing cookie taxonomy, chocolate tempering, the bizarre hardtac of the Roman centurions, and bake three fabulous and very different cookies!

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Sources:

The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, Oxford University Press, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQiii4pg4s8 

https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/03/almond-biscotti/ 

https://levainbakery.com/pages/our-story 

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-way-to-temper-chocolate

Part 3 of our introductory miniseries on our perfect tea party: Welcome to the Sugar Tier! The stars of this tier are a strawberry and lemon Battenberg cake and a rhubarb & custard mini tartlet. Lots of history in this one, as well as some diversions into our hot takes on fondant, decoration, and pie crust.

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Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battenberg_cake

http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com/2011/08/battenburg-cake-truth.html

https://www.seriouseats.com/know-your-sweets-battenberg-cake

https://labsalliebe.com/en/toot-colorful-persian-marzipan/#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20Toot%20dates,is%20noted%20to%20as%20Haremskonfekt.

AKA The Butter Tier. We talk you through classic English scones and unravel the history and technique behind clotted cream, strange and wonderful beast that she is. Plus, lavender & lime shortbread!

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Chef John's Clotted Cream:

https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-names-cream-clotted-cream.html

Mary Berry's Scones:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tea_time_scones_77839 

https://britishfoodhistory.com/2019/10/11/clotted-cream/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotted_cream

Our first full episode and part 1 of our series on tea party baking! Some tea history to set the stage before we get into tier 1 of our 3-tiered tea party menu: our favorite sandwich bread and our twist on classic tea sandwiches.

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Sources for this episode:

Welcome to Baking the Best of It! Episode one out Friday, June 21

We're lifelong bakers and best friends who love sharing our recipes, baking experiments, and knowledge. 

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The food in fantasy fiction is so important, and Brian Jacques was among the most memorable fantasy authors to write great feasts. These books are beloved by Roxie, and Fiona is a newcomer to them, so we compare our perspectives and discuss the series as a whole and the food in particular. We bake one of Redwall Abbey's beloved nut breads and enjoy it with a cheese, apple, and sage terrine!

If you've been listening for a while, you've probably gathered that we are pie afficionados. So we've finally done The Pie Episode! We also developed a new pie recipe based on Potatoes and Molasses from Over the Garden Wall (yes). This pie episode is truly exhaustive enough that we go above and beyond to make a pie nobody asked for.

Roxie takes Fiona through some Halloween treat history before they bake a Charlotte Royale together! Come for the brain cake, stay for the hot takes about Halloween baking and style over substance. Happy Halloween!

The Bánh Mì is a perfect sandwich, a glorious harmony of crunch, acid, fat, freshness, and, of course: the shattery-on-the-outside, fluffy-on-the-inside bread. You may know that France's colonization (derogatory, always derogatory) of Vietnam contributed to the existence of the Bánh Mì, but the exact details of how are quite specific and, we think, fascinating. Fiona takes Roxie through the history before we detail how we made our own Bánh Mì bread and sandwiches!

This episode might be a little bit about pie. Our intentions here were to cover autumnal apple bakes and recipes that are not apple pie, and we did do that! But because we're so passionate about pie, piessonate, we also talk quite a bit about pie. Plus, a little something called Concord Grape Corner. Cozy up with a mug of tea or mulled cider and enjoy!

A good starter pie crust recipe:

https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/11/pie-crust-102-all-butter-really-flaky-pie-dough/

Sources:

Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by Darra Goldstein, Oxford University Press, 2015

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Spy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious

The ratio of historical context to baking content in this extra-long episode is approximately 75/25 because we feel that's appropriate! Angel food cake is so much more than a dry ring of fatless sponge found on grocery store shelves across the United States, it's a distillation of the historical role of "housewife" and how it evolved post-Industrial Revolution. Fiona tells Roxie about how domestic labor roles have evolved in Europe and the United States over the last 800 years and how that evolution relates to capitalism, racism, and gender. Plus, Roxie learns to stop worrying and love angel food cake.

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Sources:

More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Basic Books, 1983

The Farmer's Wife by Helen Rebanks, Harper Horizon, 2023

The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, Oxford University Press, 2015

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/work-requirements-are-rooted-in-the-history-of-slavery/

The story of the baguette involves Napoleonic military garb, microbes, (alleged) knife fights on underground construction sites, and ultimately a very tasty bread. Come get your crouquissant on with us.

Patreon / Instagram / Twitter

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker%27s_yeast

https://wearegoodinbread.com/all-about-the-french-baguette/#:~:text=By%20a%20law%20enacted%20in,have%20sourdough%20starter%20in%20them.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/baguette-bread

https://www.chezjim.com/books/baguette/#nap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baguette#cite_note-chev-7

The first cheesecake is closer in time to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza than it is to the creation of the Basque Cheesecake in the 1980s. To make fresh cheese desserts is to be human. We cover cheesecake past, present, and future and make a Basque Cheesecake! 

Patreon / Instagram / Twitter

Sources: 

The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, Oxford University Press, 2015

https://devourtours.com/blog/san-sebastian-cheesecake/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/what-is-basque-burnt-cheesecake-where-to-eat-san-sebastian

https://smittenkitchen.com/2024/06/easy-basque-cheesecake/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPZxQ4WvgyI

https://greekreporter.com/2023/09/27/cheesecake-ancient-greece/

Malinda Russell was the first Black American to publish a cookbook and is a fascinating historical figure, despite the little information we have about her. We also discuss the task of adapting 150-year-old recipes and bake two of Malinda's: one successfully and one slightly foolishly.

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Sources

This week we examine the somewhat divisive topic of frosting, particularly on cakes. Frosted cakes are a relatively modern convention. Despite their short history, many types of buttercream have evolved. Plus, we make two types of frosting: German buttercream and Ermine flour frosting. We want to hear from you where you stand on the frosting divide: is it your favorite part of a cake or is it just too sweet and in the way?

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Why is brioche so good and how did it get like that? We dive into the science and history behind adding butter, eggs, and milk to bread to create tender, pillowy bready magic. Also, in case we're the first ones to tell you: no, Marie Antoinette never said that.

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Announcement about our release schedule, addressing our recent absence, and a bonus in which we discuss 1973's Jesus Christ Superstar. Our patreon will have lots of this kind of content: more casual and off-the-cuff conversations about baking and non-baking topics! Thank you for listening, we're looking forward to sharing more with you both on the main feed and with bonus content.

Are you sick of sourdough after 2020-2021? Too bad, we're not!! Of course we have to explore sourdough, a topic that occupies its own world in baking all to itself. Lots of excitement around microbes in this one, and of course clarification on the pre-industrial history of bread-baking.

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We're celebrating Roxie's birthday by baking a cake that literally came to her in a dream. Because the cake is complete with tempered chocolate decorations, we thought this would be a great introductory episode to some of the history and a lot of the science of chocolate in baking! Plus, a discussion of recipe development: how do we approach it?

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For all the inexplicable Star Wars jokes in this episode, not a single mention of Weird Al's version of American Pie. We're sorry and we hope you enjoy this episode anyway! We discuss the history of cakes and cake mixes in the U.S., and bake a goofy little cake from the turn of the century!

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The unexpectedly complex history of the iconic and delicious bagel and our very expected experience of making our own and learning quite a lot firsthand! Leave us a review of the show and let us know your favorite kind of bagel and your bagel order!

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For each Halloween season we must select a theme, and this year Roxie's decided it's pumpkins! We don't really get to the baking of it all until over halfway through, but the history for this one was too fun not to dive into. A twisting and turning tale of the history of the jack-o-lantern followed by all of our favorite pumpkin bakes that aren't pumpkin pie. 

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It's Fiona's birthday so she chose this episode's topic and selected the deceptively easy-to-make baklava, one of our shared favorite desserts.

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Sources