St. Jenn and her husband cook 1800s recipes with 1800s techniques — YouTube

ST GENEVIEVE, Mo. — The contradiction is hard to notice.

Justine Rayfield dresses in clothing from the Federal period, which lasted from 1780 to 1830. She cooks recipes from cookbooks of the time using ingredients, techniques and utensils from the time. She even impales a chicken on an iron bar and cooks it over a crackling fire in an open fire, with the fat dripping onto potatoes in a frying pan set over the coals.

And she filmed a video of family life in the early 1800s and posted it on YouTube.

She and her husband, Ron, have posted more than 200 15-minute videos about early American cooking to their YouTube channel, “Early American,” which has more than 1.2 million followers.

On her second channel, “Frontier Patriot,” she also reviews the food she cooks.

“I choose my foods by doing my research,” Justin says.

“And I’m the one who eats it,” Ron said.

Justin began making early 1800s cooking videos on his channel in October 2020.

“Viewers have told me that my videos have given them emotional support through COVID-19 and helped them feel more calm during their times,” she said.

The two met three years ago at the Centre for French Colonial Life in Saint-Geneviève, where they both now work part-time as historical interpreters, and Ron had watched some of Justine’s videos and discovered she lived in the area.

He invited her to a new exhibition in the historic center where he had photographed her. He welcomed her with flowers and kitchen utensils he had made himself.

“This might sound weird, but he made me a potato masher because he realized I didn’t have one,” Justin said.

“I said, ‘OK, we’re going to date now.'”

The couple was married in May. They and 90% of their guests were dressed in colonial dress. Justin and Ron’s sister prepared the wedding cake from an 1828 recipe, which was the traditional wedding cake of the time, a fruitcake.

A video of their wedding and honeymoon will be available online from July 4th. It’s titled “My Big Fat 18th Century Wedding.”

Ron, 35, is a descendant of Daniel Boone and grew up in the area, while Justine, 30, is the child of military personnel and grew up in Germany, Japan and Korea before coming to the U.S. Her father retired from Scott Air Force Base, which is what brought her to the area about 10 years ago.

She says people from Japan, Germany and Korea are very interested in their cultures, which has inspired her to think about her own American culture and heritage. She also has a particular interest in historical architecture, having spent her formative years in Heidelberg, Germany.

This sparked her interest in historic kitchens and her desire to cook in historic kitchens.

One way to experience a past culture is to listen to its music, she says, and another is to taste the foods that were eaten 200 years ago.

While volunteering at the Colonel Benjamin Stevenson House in Edwardsville, Justine had the idea to create a video showcasing cooking recipes from around 1820, when the house was built, and the Stevenson House gave her permission to film there.

“At first I was making the videos for myself. I never expected them to become so popular,” she says.

Stevenson House now has a YouTube channel with its own historical cooking videos, filmed in a style reminiscent of Justin’s work, while Justin and Ron shoot their videos in a rustic two-room cabin that Ron built for the purpose (they had only been dating for seven months at that point).

“I didn’t even tell her what I was doing until I had the frame up, and then it was too late to stop it,” he says.

The cabin is located very close to a stream so you can bring water with a bucket, but like most homes of the time it has no insulation, which means it gets cold in the winter.

In the summer it gets hot because the fireplace is burning. One day I brought a thermometer to see how hot it was. The temperature hits 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the video shoot can take eight hours.

The couple don’t live in a cabin; it’s basically a set. They’ve now built their own house (which they call the homestead) on 34 acres of mostly forested land in St. Genevieve Parish. It has all the modern conveniences and is firmly in the 21st century, although Justine often wears long, modest skirts, which she says she enjoys because they make her feel more feminine.

Though Justine has been cooking since she was eight or nine years old, she never took a cooking class (“I think you should,” she says), and the recipes from that era (as they were called back then) are notoriously inaccurate.

Cookbooks were written primarily for maids and wealthy housewives, and tended to assume that the cook already knew how much of each ingredient to use, the correct cooking temperatures and times.

Some nomenclature has also changed over the years.

“Some of the receipts say ‘put emptins in’. I only recently realised that ’emptins’ means yeast. At the time there were five other words in use in addition to this one,” she says.

Learning how to cook in the 1800s required a lot of trial and error – for example, I had to learn how to determine the right temperature to bake at in my clay oven, because there were no thermostats or thermometers.

It’s easy once you know how, says Ron.

Try sticking your arm in the oven: if you have to immediately pull it out, the oven is too hot; if you can keep it in for five seconds, the temperature is too low; if you can keep it in for three seconds, it’s the right temperature.

One of their favorite recipes is a chocolate tart, featured in the Valentine’s Day episode. The recipe, which appeared in the 1800 edition of “The Cook’s Confectioner,” involves making a custard and adding grated chocolate to it.

“People in the 18th century were crazy about chocolate. They had hot chocolate for breakfast. George Washington loved it,” Justin says.

Another hit was an Irish recipe from an American cookbook for a slow-cooked lamb stew in a Dutch oven over a charcoal fire, which they made a video about for St. Patrick’s Day.

“The aim of our channel is to show that people 200 years ago weren’t just hurling stones at each other, they were cooking sophisticated cuisine,” she says.

But not all food is great, especially when the recipes are two centuries old.

“For better or worse, I recreate these receipts exactly as they are,” Justin says.

She sometimes offers modern responses to old technology.

“Why boil lettuce? Why boil bacon? It’s so weird,” she says.

One of the worst mistakes she made was the first video she made.

The recipe for pound cake in this video is taken from the 1796 cookbook “American Cookery,” the first known cookbook written by an American.

“I had no experience in historical cooking, so I made a big, thick cake, like a modern pound cake,” she said.

The recipe said to bake it for 15 minutes. It took two hours. Months later, she learned that pound cakes from the 1800s were thin and almost cookie-like. She has since removed the video.

Sometimes, in the interest of historical integrity, they’ll make recipes that look bad to begin with, like wine-boiled barley.

The dessert was a mix of barley, lots of red wine, sugar and cinnamon – it ended up tasting like wine-flavored oatmeal.

“It was actually inedible. We usually try to eat things that we make ourselves, but this was inedible,” Justin said.

“Just like any modern cookbook, sometimes the recipes are really bad.”