As someone who includes recipes at the ends of my books, it should be no great surprise that I enjoy cooking and baking. A year or two ago I added the Outlander Kitchen cookbook by Theresa Carle-Sanders to my book collection. I love collecting historical recipes and cookbooks based on fictional books and shows. I find them more exciting than my normal cookbooks, especially when they include some unusual recipes.
This book has recipes of food mentioned throughout the series along with the corresponding excerpt from the Outlander books to show you where the recipes come from. I read the first few books ages ago and watched season one of the show. Despite stopping there, I really like the cookbook even if I don’t get most of the references. This cookbook will appeal to fans of Outlander, and those that like recipes from Claire’s time periods. Here’s a roundup of my top recipes so far.
Note: all my own cooking is modified to be gluten free. Some of the recipes in the cookbook are naturally gluten free, and those that weren’t were easy to modify. When it comes to dredging food for frying, I use white rice flour.
Fried Chicken
First up, fried chicken. This chicken is brined in sweet tea, which helps make the chicken juicier. If you don’t want the added sweetness, brining in water would also work or any other preferred method. This was the first time I made fried chicken in a long time, and I really enjoyed this recipe. The chicken came out juicy with a great coating. I ate it with BBQ sauce, but next time I might try some sort of mustard sauce. I paired my chicken with a bold scotsman breakfast tea to keep my drink on theme.
Scotch Eggs
If you are from the US, you may not have had this dish that is more popular in the UK. A scotch egg is a boiled egg covered in sausage, breadcrumbs, and then deep fried. Every time I go to a ren faire and see scotch eggs, I want one. Unfortunately regular ones are full of gluten, making these another recipe I had to make myself just so I could finally try them. These are easy to modify by dredging in any gluten free flour (I use white rice) and gluten free bread crumbs.
This is one of those recipes that take a hot minute to make, but they aren’t hard. I boiled the eggs in my instant pot and shut them off a minute early and immediately washed them in cold water. This keeps the yolks from overcooking when you deep fry them. Scotch Eggs for a very filling protein-packed meal that would be great for picnics. I love dipping mine in a honey dijon mustard sauce. This is a recipe that I loved and will keep making.
Buckwheat pancakes
I regret not grabbing a picture of these. This isn’t my favorite pancake recipe because it uses yeast, which means you have to give the batter time to sit for an hour or two. I put mine together the night before so I could could as soon as I was ready in the morning, which I highly recommend if you don’t want to sit around waiting for your batter to proof in the morning.
Also side note, buckwheat is gluten free despite the name. Buckwheat makes for a darker pancake in color compared to my usual blends, and it has a more earthy flavor to them that had a bitter edge. Because of that I liked fresh fruit on top to make them more flavorful. I’d still choose my regular pancakes over them because I just didn’t love the buckwheat flavor.
Syllabub
The only dessert I’ve gotten around to so far is syllabub, mainly because Tasting History with Max Miller did an episode on this dessert and I love that youtube show. (I swear I’ll take pictures of everything from now on). This dessert is basically a flavored version of whipped cream. It tastes way better than store bought whipped cream and is worth making. I don’t eat it on it’s own, but love to add it on top of other desserts, like an orange syllabub on top of brownies. You can make syllabub in a variety of flavors, making it a versatile, light dessert to eat on its own or dress up other desserts.
I still have a lot of recipes to try from this book that I’m eager to get around to, including an oat bread, fish fillets poached in wine, cheese enchiladas, and quite a few desserts. So far scotch eggs are my reigning champion from this book. Can’t wait to see if any other recipes can beat them.