Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 2
Layer Cake
This recipe recalls the layer cake that Anne makes with anodyne liniment in this chapter, but you’ll no doubt notice, dear listener, that this recipe contains no liniment of any kind! Instead, what we have here is a cake for celebrations - birthday parties, extravagant picnics, tea with your best china and best friend, or just a particularly delightful Sunday afternoon. Also know that you can substitute the more Victorian fillings and finishing details with your favourite buttercream frosting to bring this cake into the twenty-first century, to suite more modern tastes!
Ingredients:
1/2 c butter, melted, plus more for cake tins
2 c sifted all-purpose flour, plus more for cake tins
1 tbsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 1/4 c granulated sugar
1 c milk (2%)
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla (definitely NOT anodyne liniment!)
Arrange the oven racks so your cakes will sit in the centre of your oven. Preheat your oven to 350 F (180 C). Butter and flour two nine-inch cake pans. Set them aside.
In a large bowl, add you flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Mix together.
Add the melted butter and milk to the flower mixture and stir to wet the dry ingredients.
Beat the mixture with an electric mixer (or a whisk, if you’re looking for a workout!) for about a minute, until thoroughly combined.
Finally, add your eggs and vanilla to the batter, then beat for another three minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl.
Pour the batter evenly into your cake tins. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into each cake comes out clean. Allow to cool for at least ten minutes in the pan, and then completely on a cooling rack, once de-panned.
Now, the world is your oyster - at least, when it comes to this cake. You could choose a luscious, wobbly lemon curd as filling, a ruby-bright layer of raspberry jam, or the glowing sunset of apricot preserves instead. You could go for a Victoria sandwich and pair strawberry jam and freshly-whipped cream as your cake’s filling. And, as mentioned above, any favourite frosting is always an option. Like a sandwich, this cake can contain all sorts of delicious and delightful fillings, depending on your mood - so have fun! When it comes to the top of your cake, you can leave it bare to show off the delicious middle of your creation. You could dust it with powdered sugar and decorate with fresh or dried fruit or preserved flowers for an extra special touch. Or if you wanted to get really Victorian, you could try a layer of marzipan to seal the deal! Or, if you are hoping for a finish that is less taxing but still very satisfying, a simple powdered sugar glaze will harden if allowed to cool, adding sweetness and a little texture to your cake. Sounds like good eating, however you slice it!
Jennifer
Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 3
Pound cake
The original recipe for pound cake, as we discovered in this week’s episode, calls for a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Not only does that make an absolutely gargantuan amount of batter, but it is also very expensive - it uses A LOT of eggs and A LOT of butter. Thankfully, the ratio is the thing: all we have to do to get a smaller, more manageable final result, is to reduce our amounts. If you want a crowd-sized, historically accurate cake, dear reader, go for broke and use a pound each of every ingredient. Otherwise, you’ll need the following:
Ingredients
1 c butter, softened, plus butter for the cake pan
1 c sugar
5 eggs
1 c flour, plus flour for the cake pan
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees C. Butter and flour two 13x9 cake tins, or an equivalent-sized Bundt pan.
In a large bowl, cream your butter and sugar together until they are light and creamy. Because there are no chemical leaveners in this recipe, you must cream your butter and sugar together very well, until all the sugar has dissolved (you can test this by pinching a bit of the mixture between your fingers and feeling for sugar granules - when fully mixed, it should feel smooth). When properly creamed, the mixture will also be a paler colour, because of all the air you’ve added in.
Mix in your eggs, one at a time, and stir together to combine.
Finally, add in your flour, in two or three additions to make mixing easier and less messy, until just combined. Be careful not to over-mix your batter; that will make it tough.
Divide your batter evenly between your two pans (a scale can help with this, but you can also eyeball it) and smooth the tops with a spatula.
Bake in your preheated oven for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the cakes comes out clean. If you notice that your cakes are browning too quickly, tent them with some aluminium foil.
Allow your baked cakes to rest in the pans, about 15-20 minutes, and then transfer to a baking rack to cool completely. Serve in slices on its own, or pair this flexible multi-tasker with fruit, ice-cream, a simple powdered sugar glaze - anything that makes your heart happy!
Now, there are many ways to add other flavours to this recipe - lemon zest for a lemon pound cake, vanilla extract for a vanilla version, and any sort of flavoured frosting (chocolate for instance) to up the tasty factor, but there is also something really charming and satisfying about the original. Enjoy!
Monster Mash
I have an over-active imagination. I always have. As a kid, watching a frightening scene in a movie (and the bar for what I counted as frightening was astonishingly low) could leave me with nightmares for weeks. My parents found it easier to skip through a lot of films, or end them early, than to be woken up for the better part of a month by my tremulous voice calling ‘Mummy!’ every night.
Sadly, this tendency hasn’t gone. It’s sort of cute when you’re three. When you’re thirty, though, it becomes a lot less charming. I saw a still - just an image, mind you - of Gary Oldman as Dracula in Coppola’s 1992 film, and now my brain is absolutely convinced that Gary Oldman-Dracula lives in my shower, waiting to pounce when I get up for a drink of water. Horrible, vivid images plague me - at times, my mind offers up a long-fingered hand, with nails overgrown and cracked, that presses against my bedroom window and leaves smears of blood on the glass. This is sometimes replaced by a heavy body with sinewy arms dragging itself up my hallway, legs immobile, eye sockets empty. A face leers out at me from my bathroom mirror, eyes wild and wide, with too many teeth and face stretched into a too-wide grimace - but I only see it in the corner of my eye, in the half-light of evening. And now, Gary Oldman in a ludicrous wig and velvet robe joins these apparitions, licking blood from a razor, strangling hands poised to snatch at me from behind my shower curtain. I know, I know that these things are not real, cannot harm me - in the light of day. But at night, when the air is still and dark, it is quite a different matter.
So you can imagine that Hallowe’en presents some problems. Hallowe'en is a complex time of year for me. I love sweets, but hate to be scared. As a child, trick-or-treating was never really in my wheelhouse, so my parents and grand-parents adjusted the traditional system to accommodate a shy, fearful pre-schooler. Instead of going from door to door, hollering childish threats at people I'd never met, we went straight to Gramma and Grampa's house. I wore my customary mouse costume, the one that was, to my memory, made of shag carpet, and could go over my clothes instead of a parka and snow-pants, which are often as necessary for a Winnipeg Hallowe'en as the requisite plastic pumpkin bucket.
I did not scream “Trick or treat!” at my grandparents' front door. I didn't know about 'trick-or-treat' as an option for Hallowe'ening. Instead, after labouring up their front steps in my stuffy costume, I rang the doorbell and called “Hallowe'en apples!” in a sing-song voice. I have no idea from where this chant originated. I didn't have any apples. Whatever the logic (or lack thereof), that is what I shouted, and without fail, my grandmother would open the door and exclaim over my costume before ushering me inside for home-made treats and other forms of extravagant spoiling. This was the extent of my Hallowe'en experience: in fact, until I reached school, Hallowe'en meant dressing up and visiting Gramma and Grampa's, two of my favourite things.
But then I began grade school, and Hallowe'en took on fuller meaning. Suddenly there needed to be an indoor costume for school, and an outdoor one for trick-or-treating. I still went to my grandparents' house dressed as a mouse, but during the day, I had to have something different for the costume parade and the other festive activities on offer. My mother was kind enough to provide me with a sparkly tulle skirt and leotard, which worked very well for a ballerina, or, when furnished with a plastic crown and wand, a fairy. (When I got older, more adventurous costumes like Queen Cleopatra or a bunch of grapes seemed like good ideas). The costume parade consisted of twenty-odd first-graders marching around our classroom in a circle. I hated promenading up and down for people to gawk at me, so the costume parade made me squirm. I recall heaving a sigh of relief when we were finally allowed to sit back down in our little desks and glue facial features onto paper pumpkins, or make ghosts out of tissue paper. The worst part of the day was no doubt Madame Gordon's French lesson. We trouped down to her classroom in our now-wilted costumes and sat in the creaky wooden desks before her. There was typically a crossword puzzle and a word search for us to hunt down 'sorciere' and 'citrouille' and 'phantome', which I was perfectly happy to complete. But then, with what I maintain was gleeful cruelty, Madame would plonk her ancient tape-player on her desk and make us sing along to a terrifying song: 'C'est l'Hallowe'en.' In retrospect, the ditty itself was harmless: I have listened to it since then, and it's basically a few descriptive verses, with a bouncy, repetitive, chanting chorus of “C'est l'Hallowe'en, c'est l'Hallowe'en”. But the recording was laced with eerie sound-effects that matched the lyrics. Particularly, the scratchy violin that illustrated the coiling nature of “un serpent bleu” sent a frisson of nerves jangling down my spine.
Hallowe'en continued in this vein for some time before it changed again. High school brought on parties, where I was expected to wear costumes and bring snacks. I was happy with this situation. I will admit, however, that I didn't quite get the memo about sexy costumes. Now that I was old enough to make my own costuming decisions, I had a good time coming up with what I thought were fun and interesting choices. I went as Marcel Marceau's Bip the clown one year, and as the Dead Sea another. I made a red felt cape, antennae, and wore pearls for a lady-bug costume of which I was particularly proud. Later costumes included Spinelli from the television cartoon Recess, and the Paper-bag Princess from Robert Munsch's book by the same name. Clearly my tastes leaned towards what might be called juvenile.
It was around this time that I began to learn more about Hallowe'en itself. All Saints' and All Souls' Day from the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church were meant to be spent remembering the dearly departed and praying to the litany of saints. Indeed, the name Hallowe'en derives from All Hallow's Eve, where 'hallows' is a synonym for holy or sanctified. This tradition carries on in the Mexican Dios de los Muertos, or days of the dead, when lost loved ones are honoured with feasting and grave-side visits and offerings. In Europe, particularly in England, the fear of death came to override the memorial elements of the festival, and it was believed that alongside the spirits of the dead, demons and devils would walk the earth and wreak havoc. This notion was embroidered and developed to the point where many people believed (and some do to this day) that the gates of Hell open on the 31st of October, and that all the horrid things who take up residence there visit the physical world to spread evil and cause trouble. Tasty treats set out for deceased family members soon became peace offerings to assuage the brutal natures of these hellish visitors. In time, it became customary for people, typically young men, to dress as demons or angry ghosts, in part to blend in with the roaming ghoulies, and partly to enjoy the free food on offer. If nice nibbles were not available to placate the 'demons', these rogues, perhaps spurred on by their devilish counterparts, performed mischievous acts, meant to frighten or inconvenience, but not to harm, their stingy victims. This practice was called guising or mumming, and is the origin of our modern-day trick-or-treating. In a way, these traditions use humour and fun to mock death and the unknown, and give us tools to come to grips with things that normally confuse, frighten, and disturb us. I am particularly fond of the logic that dictates that if something or someone should scare you, you should laugh at it, and then feed it goodies. Maybe I ought to try that with Gary Oldman-Dracula.
Other scary traditions have become entangled with this holiday, so that now we are not in the least surprised to see werewolves, vampires, and monsters alongside demons and ghosts. These frightening creatures come to us from a variety of sources, including Gothic literature, folk tales, horror films, and national customs. Originally a holiday for all ages, the more recent focus on children at Hallowe'en means that downright cute and cuddly costumes and celebrations are commonplace. Such as, for example, a mouse costume, or visits to grandparents. One way or the other, I've come to like Hallowe'en, despite my distaste for scary stuff. It's a time of year when normalcy is suspended: indulging in buckets of candy (literally) is encouraged, the frightening and ferocious is embraced and fed tasty treats, and disguising yourself, as a monster or a mouse, is an essential part of the fun.
Jennifer
One Horse Open Sleigh
It is not the correct time of year to be day-dreaming about riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, but in spite of the flowers and budding trees, the image of a carved sleigh whisking through the snow behind a prancing pony (all right, a prancing cart horse), leaving nothing but clean sleigh tracks in its wake, is a delightful one. Add to that excitement the thrill of being unsupervised by a chaperone, as Anne, Diana, and their friends are in this week’s chapter, and suddenly a whole world of prospects opens up.
I remember very clearly when one of my closest high school friends got her licence. She was the first in our group of friends to get it, and similarly to Anne and Diana, our horizons widened. We could go where we liked, without having to ask for rides from parents or cranky older siblings. The world was our oyster, and we went wherever the wind (and a second-hand hatchback) could take us! In reality, that turned out to be exactly the same places we had gone in parent-driven minivans: the local mall, the cheap-seat movie theatre, school dances, sleepovers at friends’ houses. There were some minor differences, in the end, but they felt crucial at the time. The first was that we chose the music: instead of 102.3 Clear FM, which played what I derisively thought of as ‘soccer mom music’, we blasted sugary, mind-numbing indie pop, usually played from scribbled-upon CDs, filled with downloaded favourites of questionable quality. The second was that we always owed our friend gas money.
I never learned to drive. I took the classes and passed the test, and spent weeks practicing in a car with two steering wheels and two sets of brakes: one for me, one for the instructor. Behind the wheel, I completely lost my nerve. The thought of hitting something - or worse, someone - loomed so large for me that even getting into the driver’s seat sent my stomach plummeting to somewhere in the region of my feet. My enduring memory of trying to learn to drive is a view through the front windshield, the road coming at me so fast it made my head spin, hands obediently at ten and two, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my fingers turned white. I left indents in the pleather steering wheel cover. I can tell you, dear reader, from experience, that it is very challenging to drive and scream-cry at the same time: tears obscure the vision rather, which is not ideal.
Much earlier in life, I did learn to ride horses. So, frankly, I suspect I would be much more at home driving a ‘one horse open sleigh’ than behind the wheel of any motor vehicle. Someone once expressed incredulity at this bizarre set of skills, and to an extent, I see their point: I am perhaps better equipped to be an eighteenth century gentlewoman than a modern girl, educated as I have been to ride horses and knit and sew and paint charming cards and, horror of horrors, read novels. If I could lay my hands on a decent set of stays and panniers, I’d be all set. But my feeling is that choosing horses over horsepower is perfectly reasonable - they are much prettier, and they have self-preservation. I’ve seen Thelma and Louise: cars will go careening off cliffs if they are left to their own devices. Horses are much more sensible - generally speaking, in my experience, if you let a horse go where it likes, it will go home. Admirable creatures. Besides, they haven’t written any classic holiday songs about driving cars, have they? But a ‘one horse open sleigh’ was obviously a worthy enough subject to deserve its own hymn. Makes sense to me. Jingle all the way!
Jennifer
Sick
I get colds like it’s going out of style. Some people seem to get gentle colds that leave them a little sniffy, a little croaky, a bit tired by the end of the day. When I get colds, they knock me absolutely flat. The typical advice about drinking lots of tea and eating soup and resting is all very well and good, but, as my godmother says, if you leave a cold alone it lasts seven days, and if you treat it, it will last a week. Unfortunately, I am not a patient patient. I can tolerate being sick for about five seconds, and then I get cross. I have things to do! Who has time for lolling around in bed, waiting for a pestilence to pass? Being angry doesn’t help, but I struggle not to rage. Very quickly, I am swimming in a soup of self-pity, throat pastilles, disgusting cough syrup and a head that feels full of feathers. I often find myself reminiscing about how wonderful it was to be able to breathe, and desperately promsing whoever might be listening that if only this cold would go, I would never take my nose for granted ever again. This is a lie: as soon as I am better, I go right back to thanklessly expecting my nose and lungs and throat to behave themselves as a matter of course, but while the cold is in full force, I feel nothing but nostalgia for those halcyon days when breathing was a breeze.
It’s difficult to write about sickness, or pain. Pierce Brown claims that pain is a universal language, but I am not so sure. I know how my pain feels when I stub my toe or my dull, diffuse ache the day after a tough workout, but no matter how many words I throw at it, I cannot feel your pain, and you cannot feel mine. I am more inclined to agree with Virginia Woolf, who tells us that pain destroys language: the fuzzy, groggy, heavy-but-light, dizzying feeling in the head during a cold is how I experience it, but really, all those words don’t quite explain that particular sensation. A head full of feathers - what does that mean? Very quickly (in this case, almost instantly) I find myself devolving into metaphor and simile, waxing poetic about an experience that is anything but poetical. Suddenly, we are abstracting pain, something that is quite real, but cannot be made real outside of ourselves. We run into this difficulty at the doctor’s office - is my pain a one or a ten? How on earth should I know that? Maybe it would be better to use sounds to indicate pain, not words or numbers or a smiley face chart. The even, nagging ache of delayed onset muscle soreness is a low, rumbling hum. A stubbed toe starts out as a loud cry and softens to a whimper (much like the sound I actually make when that happens). Krrkrrrkrrrkrrrkrrrkrrr for the tension in my jaw; a high-pitched, unending sqreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee for that time I burned my hand on a pot handle. Pulling a splinter is a quick, churlish beep!, quite loud. Chronic illness is the grinding of ill-fitting cogs rubbing together: you may sometimes be able to tune it out, but it never ends. And colds? Well, those are almost certainly a grumbling, creaky mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmm in the throat, dry and raspy, like a growling dog. It might be strange, but in some ways rather comforting, to go into a doctor’s office, and when asked to describe your pain, let out a deafening bellow or ear-splitting shriek. It would certainly be more satisfying than meekly pointing at a face on a chart, and hoping to be believed.
Jennifer
Bathtime
I found a delightful, and rather strange book recently, full of recipes for…baths? The author contends that regular old bath water will not do. Instead, she insists that we must fill our tubs with intoxicating concoctions of such ingredients as flower petals, homemade bathbombs, orange slices, whole mint leaves, bags of tea, and almond milk. I have not tested this assertion, but the photographs in this book do make the endeavour appear very tempting. The author offers recipes and instructions for relaxing baths, invigorating baths, ones for meditation, ones for dry skin, and even hand and foot baths for, you know…hands and feet. Each of these recipes come along with music playlist recommendations and recipes for flavoured water or tea (to drink) that are meant to accompany the bather.
I am not, generally speaking, wild about baths. In this week’s episode, we touch briefly on how Victorians got clean, and how they did wash but did not bath, and frankly, that system of a standing wash would suit me right down to the ground - or washtub. I know some folks are all about long, langourous soaks in tubs, but I find baths boring and ineffective for getting clean. As a child, my mother had to sing “Keep the water in the bathtub” to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to encourage me not to splash, which I think is a good indication that bathtime is only enjoyable when toys and violence are involved. Ernie and Rubber Duckie seem to like baths a great deal, but at the end of the day, they’re not for me. I find that you get into the tub, all ready to have your cares and worries melt away in the hot water - and within a few moments, you begin to feel a strange kinship with a boiled egg or a pot of soup. You can’t read without risking a sopping wet book - I avoid using my phone in the bathroom for similar reasons. I could put music on, but then I’d feel like serenaded soup. There is nothing to do in a bath. My frazzled brain becomes frantic, not relaxed, when faced with half an hour of sitting in water that grows steadily colder. I took an epsom salt bath for sore muscles a while ago, and my cat looked aghast at me, perched in the window, obviously terrified and perplexed about why I would choose to drown myself so calmly. Our old beagle, who has gone on to the Great Sofa in the Sky, had to get baths once in a while, and bore them with a kind of pathetic, long-suffering patience, staring up at me dolefully as if to say “why must you torment me so?” Frankly, I am inclined to agree with the wisdom of the beasts. Mostly, when I have gotten into a bathtub, I am waiting for it to be acceptable for me to get back out again.
This bath book though - wow, just reading it is very soothing. I may never put lemon slices and roses in my bathtub, but I am definitely a fan of reading about them. This is perhaps not dissimilar to my experience of watching Angela Lansbury’s 1989 exercise video “Positive Moves,” which is full of gentle stretching movements, peach onesies, and questionable midi piano music. I love watching that video. Have I ever done the little stretches, or rolled around on the floor a la Angela, on her pristine, rose-patterned rug? No, dear reader, I have not. But there is something deeply soothing about the fuzzy film quality and Angela’s cheerful voiceover about drinking tea and cycling or eating tofu ice cream for dessert. If you haven’t seen it, I beseech you to seek it out (it is available to watch online) and enjoy what feels like a time capsule and the beginnings of influencer culture. “Positive Moves” and the bath book both have a sort of dreamy quality, rather detached from reality. Where is this incredible bathroom, full of fruits and teas and herbs, and what is this life wherein I can dedicate half of my grocery list to bathtime decorations, and then promptly scrape all that organic matter off the bottom of my tub and deposit it directly in the compost? I can tell you one thing for certain, dear reader - it is not my life.
“Positive Moves” ends with Angela floating in a bathtub absolutely brimming with bubbles - luxurious and modesty-preserving! She certainly seems to be enjoying herself, floating around in an Olympic-sized bathtub, with French doors that lead onto a garden beyond her, and soft, glowing candles flickering on every horizontal surface. I long for the day when someone publishes an in-depth analysis of “Postive Moves”, and possibly the bath book also, so that perhaps, I can finally understand what it is about them that I find so fascinating. And maybe by then I will have relaxed enough to be able to enjoy a bath. It seems unlikely, but one can dream.
Jennifer
Raspberry Cordial
Raspberries, those tartly sweet little gems, fairly sing of dappled sunshine and the ripe tang of August, what I always think of as the Sunday of summer. This recipe for raspberry cordial captures that sweetness, and makes an admirable addition to a picnic, glowing like jewels and tasting like youth. If, like me, you are several long weeks away from the delights of summer and require this cordial to sustain you until summer does arrive, then frozen raspberries will absolutely do the job here. Make this in advance to let the flavours mingle, pack it away in a picnic basket, and enjoy, heartened by the knowledge that this cordial will not set you drunk - even after three glasses! Sippity sip!
Ingredients
10 oz (568) unsweetened raspberries
1 1/4 c (250 g) sugar
3 lemons, divided
4 c (950 ml) water
Instructions:
Put the unthawed raspberries into a large saucepan, and add the sugar.
Cook over medium heat, stirring occaisionally, for 20 to 25 minutes, until all the sugar has dissolved.
With a potato masher or the back of a spoon, mash the raspberries and syrup thoroughly.
Pour the mixture through a strainer, making sure you extract all of the juice. Discard the pulp.*
Juice two of the lemons and add their juice to the raspberry liquid.
Bring the water to a boil, then add the boiling water to the raspberry liquid.
Let the raspberry cordial cool, and then chill it in the refridgerator.
When the cordial is ready to serve, cut the remaining lemon into thin slices and garnish your glass with a lemon slice - so fancy. This cordial makes a welcome addition to tea parties, picnics, and summer afternoons. If you are so inclined, it can be added to sparkling water for an extra-refreshing kick, although I understand that not everyone likes their water to be fizzy - I have heard sparkling water likened to drinking bees, which feels like a pretty apt description.
*The original recipe calls for discarding the raspberry pulp, and you certainly can, but I hate the thought of so much food waste. I recommend saving the remaining raspberry pulp to spread on toast for breakfast, spoon over yogurt or ice cream, or pair with pound cake (the recipe for which you will find in a coming post!), a bit like coulis or jam. I’ve also had success with adding it to muffins or loaf cake, but do be aware that you may need to adjust your liquid and sugar measurements if you take this route. No matter how you choose to use the pulp, if you do keep it for future use, it must be refrigerated. Enjoy!
Jennifer
School Daze
Ahh, school. I spent a loooooong time in school - more of my life in than out, although eventually that balance will tip. The schedule of school no longer binds me, but still, September rolls around, the sun grows more golden, sets a little earlier, the wind gets a special tangy snap, and I find myself longing for a new notebook, a bright crop of coloured pens, natty school shoes, and, as Nora Ephron put it, a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. I was very excited for my first day of school. My mother walked me to the front door of the dull red-brick building. My bangs had been fastidiously brushed, and my long hair braided and tied with two puffy, bulbous scrunchies, one at each end of my plait. September breathed its chilly air down the neck of my jacket, but there were leaves on the ground for stomping and swishing, so I didn't mind. Mrs. Albers-Jones, my first-grade teacher, was a kind and soothing sort of person, with a soft, low voice and long printed cotton skirts that swirled around her legs and brushed the tops of her sandals. The classroom was bright and busy: the cloakroom and the tickle-trunk were jammed together in one corner; our little Formica desks stood stolidly in the middle of the room; a flattened, defeated carpet of indeterminate colour was offered to us for sitting on while Mrs. Albers-Jones spoke to us. One little girl near me was weeping noisily, drawing constricted breaths between sobs. I was confused at her tears, but no one else seemed to be taking much notice of her, so I turned my attention back to Mrs. Albers-Jones.
I remember pieces of that morning in fuzzy flashes. We got our own file folders with our names on them, where we were to put our homework and assignments. We tacked up our names over the hooks in the cloakroom so we knew where our jackets and boots would go when winter came. Mrs. Albers-Jones read to us from a book, but it was too long to finish. She walked us around the classroom, showing us where our math booklets were, and where we could sharpen our enormous red pencils that had no erasers, and where the eraser tin was if we needed to erase anything, which of course, we often did.
The morning seemed to pass in a blur, and suddenly shrill bells were screaming out the call to recess. I had been to a sort of school before, having gone to daycare, and knew about name-tags and packed lunches, desiccated glue sticks and sharing, dog-eared books and cubby-holes. Recess, however, was new to me. I filed out in frightened obedience with my classmates, and was suddenly faced with a never-ending playground, swirling with other children who seemed to know exactly what recess was for, thank you very much. To my left, there was a creaking wooden play-structure, crawling with screaming creatures. Two hills, one big and one small, swelled out of the ground before me: I could not determine their purpose. To my right was a field, or as I was to later learn, three fields, where painted steel goal posts stood sentinel over soccer games. Around the corner from the little stone steps upon which I was still hesitantly perched was a black-top, painted with yellow lines to mark out the four-square court, the hopscotch, and the tether-ball circle. I ventured first to the black-top in search of a friend who was in an upper grade, but she was busy with her own friends of her own age, and I was left standing alone, watching a game of four-square which I had not yet learned to play. I wandered back to the big hill, which was closest to the door from which I'd come. I didn't know how long recess was meant to be, so I thought it would be best not to wander too far. I sat and played with the grass, building a little house for some pioneer ants who were without shelter, like my then-heroine Laura Ingalls, and went on to build a little fire pit with some sticks and a swimming pool from a dead leaf, which was empty at the time, but, I reasoned, could be filled with rain water. I was sitting next to a rut in the big hill, a kind of impromptu path which had been worn down from so many children walking up it, and just as I was putting the finishing touches on my splendid ant villa, a boy with lights in his runners that flashed each time he took a step went pelting past, bellowing ferociously, and trod on my wonderful architecture.
I looked up at his retreating back, my mouth hanging open and my brows meeting beneath my fringe, but before I could utter a sound at this monstrous brute, an ear-splitting ringing sounded from the school bell. I dusted the dead grass from my pants, and scurried down the hill. Another shriek, this time the voice of a child, joined the bell's horrible noise. I wondered who was screaming. Surely it did very little good to scream at the end of recess? It wouldn't make it go on longer, and the bell was already making enough racket on its own, without needing the help of some unfortunate creature on the playground. I glanced around to see who was shouting.
It was me.
Jennifer
Down on the Farm
Each morning, I make a cup of tea, and usually add a splash of milk to my cup. The milk comes from a waxed cardboard carton, emblazoned with a company logo and charming little drawings of rolling hills and grazing cattle. This morning, I stared at the milk carton while my tea was steeping, and thought about those cartoon cows. Even before the agrarian revolution and industrialisation, most dairy cows did not graze on unending ranches - dairy farmers kept their cows close to home to make milking easier and faster. These days, most dairy cows do not see the light of day - they spend their lives indoors. Grazing is the domain of beef cattle. The drawings on my milk carton are a sweet, appealing falsehood, relying on the ignorance of city slickers like me to sell an idea about darling dairy cows with names like ‘Betsy’ and ‘Mildred’ and ‘Daisy’, a sort of mix between Beatrix Potter, Marie Antoinette’s pretend farm at Versailles, and James Herriott.
I suspect those who grow up in more rural environments, with closer access to the realities of cattle farming, might not be so easily fooled by my milk carton. Similarly, I suspect the sons and daughters of farming families do not normally wax poetic about cows, which I am about to do. One of my first jobs was to muck out stalls at the horse barn where I learned to ride, in exchange for lessons. Across the gravel road from the horse barn was a cattle pasture, often populated with a handful of placid cows, chewing their cud, swishing their long tails, standing stolidly together, staring into the middle distance like the noblest dukes. These were beef cattle, and they had rough, shaggy coats, broad creamy-white foreheads, and stubborn looks on their faces. They grazed, unbothered, in nearly all weathers. There was something very charming, very appealing about them, clustered in little groups of three or four, jaws working interminably, but I never went near them. I grew up around horses, and their peculiarities (which are varied and legion) are at least familiar to me. But the ways of cows are unknown to me. I am given to understand that they can be dangerous because they are so curious - they likely will not mean to hurt you, but you can easily be stomped upon or trampled by a cow who has gotten very close to you, and brought all her nosy friends along for an investigation. In my experience, if you go into a horse pasture (especially if you are swinging a halter and rope from your arm), then the horses will slowly and determinedly stroll away from you. It is good practice to bring some form of bribery along with you to collect a horse, or make peace with chasing them all over their field. Cows, apparently, may well wander up to you and surround you, all inquisitiveness - not an ideal trait in an animal that weighs as much as a small car. Horses tend to be wily, flightly, particular, and given to strong emotions. Cows seem, at least to me, to take life more philosophically.
The same horse barn that kept ponies also, for a time, had flocks of sheep. Sheep are quite a different kettle of fish. They are trusting, generally quite sweet-natured, placid - and very stupid. I once watched, incredulously, as a ewe stood at one end of a field, calling for her lamb who stood alone at the other end. The lamb and ewe were crying out for each other pitiously, with equal vigour - but it did not seem to ever occur to either one to cross the field. This went on for some time. A ram from the same flock once had a ferocious battle with fence post. I could not possibly say who won. But one cannot help but feel a special affection for sheep, who gaze upon humans with such obligingly, eager little faces. I don’t think it’s a mistake that so many shepherding cultures imagine the relationship between humans and God through the metaphor of sheep and shepherd. They (the sheep) have no idea what is going on, but they are not worried, because you are there, and you will take care of them. I’m afraid the implications for the brain power of humanity isn’t great, but the sheep aren’t wrong - we will look after them, the wooly little idiots, if only because we know how badly things would go for them if we didn’t.
Jennifer
Ice Cream
Is there anything more delightful on a sweaty summer afternoon than ice cream? When I was a child, my family would make a yearly pilgrimage to the local, nearly legendary ice cream stand in our town, and perform our summer ritual of enjoying our usual orders (mine was always a dipped vanilla cone - simple, classic.) Ice creams in hand, we would meander over the nearby bridge that spanned the river, make a long, lazy loop, and return to the ice cream stand, the sun sinking behind us, with sticky fingers, full of ice cream and satisfaction.
The ice cream recipe that follows is quite a different experience, dear reader. This ice cream is home-made, quaint, and charming, recalling well-scrubbed kitchen tables, jam jars, and crisp gingham aprons. There are no fancy dips or extravagant waffle cones - this ice cream doesn’t need them. It sings all on its own. You will notice, if you embark on this recipe, that it is quite an undertaking: Victorian cooking was serious business! You will also notice that it uses a fair amount of hardware, particularly bowls. For the Victorian home cook, ice cream required skills, patience, a little muscle, and someone to do the washing up afterwards! For your entertainment, dear reader, I have included some historical notes along with the ingredients and instructions to delight you while you toil. Those practiced cooks and chefs among you will likely spot that this is essentially a recipe for custard, with the additions of whipped cream and whipped egg whites to lighten it and give it extra protein structures to keep it from freezing solidly - which, really is exactly what ice cream is, at the end of the day: a kind of frozen custard. I hope that if you try this recipe and its results, you do so on a summer day that is sun-soaked and sweet. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
2 c (475 ml) whipping cream
2 tsp gelatin
1/4 c (60 ml) cold water
1 c (235 ml) whole milk
1/2 c (100 g) sugar
3 tbsp (65 g) corn syrup
1 tsp all-purpose flour
Pinch salt
1 large egg
1 tbsp (15 ml) vanilla extract
Instructions:
Place the whipping cream, electric beaters, and a large mixing bowl in the fridge to chill (this is where a Victorian cook would have to rely on their icebox or ice house!)
Add about 2 inches (5 cm) of water to the bottom of a double boiler and begin to boil.
Add the gelatin and cold water to the top pot of the double boiler. Let the gelatin soften for five minutes away from the stove.
Meanwhile, pour the milk into a small saucepan and place it over medium-low heat. When tiny bubbles form around the edge of the pot, the milk is ready.
To the gelatin in the top pot of the double boiler, add the hot milk, sugar, corn syrup, flour, and salt. Place over the bottom pot of the double boiler containing the boiling water.
Stir constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens, about fifteen minutes.
Put the lid on the double boiler and cook the mixture over boiling water for another ten minutes.
Meanwhile, break the egg and separate the yolk and white into two small bowls. You can use a fancy tool for this, or pass the yolk between the two eggshell halves, or just use your hand to remove the yolk. Set aside the egg white for later.
Beat the egg yolk with a fork. When the ten minutes are up, stir the egg yolk slowly into the mixture on the top of the stove. Cook and stir for another minute.
Pour the hot ice cream mixture through a strainer into a large mixing bowl - but not the chilled one from the fridge.
When the ice cream mixture has cooled to room temperature, beat it with the electric mixer until it is light and creamy, about five minutes. A 19th century cook would have to do this by hand with a whisk, for a lot longer than five minutes!
In the chilled large mixing bowl, whip the cold whipping cream with the electric mixer and chilled beaters until it forms soft peaks.
Rinse the beaters thoroughly with hot water, then beat the egg white until it is stiff and glossy, but not dry.
Very gently, with a spatula, fold first the whipped cream, then the egg white, into the ice cream mixture. Gently stir in the vanilla extract.
Spoon the mixture into a metal bowl or pan and place in the freezer. Freeze for about three or four hours, until firm.
Gobble up your ice cream by itself or with fruit, preserves, and any toppings that make your heart happy. For an extra, historically-accurate experience, serve it in small glass cups or dishes, with a spoon - no waffle cones need apply!
Jennifer
Peppermint Twist
I am a toddler, standing in the living room of my parent’s house, and I am dancing. I am wearing those turquoise cat pajamas, the ones with the big pink cat on the front of the shirt and the matching bottoms, my fat little fingers splayed wide. My father, in a natty sweater, has taken up the usual position of fathers in my family - holding the camera, out of shot. He has put on a CD, and I am bouncing on my toes, grinning toothily, pushing my floppy bangs out of my face. The music playing is energetic and springy, with a lot of high hat, a bright guitar solo, and goofy lyrics. It’s the Peppermint Twist.
I am a school-aged child, taking a flight with my mother to visit family. The airport is that strange bone grey, a colour, I have always assumed, chosen specifically to depress travellers as much as possible. Families are moving together in loose bundles, and my mother grips my hand as we weave between them. There are businessmen in sloppy grey suits and bad shoes, hurrying around people importantly, and backpackers with all their worldly goods hoisted onto their shoulders, and a volleyball team, all leggy teens with excitable faces and sweatshirts emblazoned with something like 'PANTHERS’, lugging duffel bags and ignoring their coaches. This is the usual crush of people, all moving inexorably to the strange flat seats of the gates, waiting in lines, sighing, shifting their bags. Harassed flight attendants corrall that crush into their seats, pained and patient smiles plastered on their faces as they demonstrate how to put on seatbelts and reminding everyone not to smoke. My mother pulls a pack of gum out of her purse and offers me a piece.
“For the air pressure,” she explains, taking her own piece. “To keep your ears from popping.”
I take my stick of gum, and chew it cheerfully. It’s peppermint.
I am a teenager, squashed into a booth with my friends. We are drinking cheap soda and questionable pizza at a chain restaurant, boisterous and excitable because we are unsupervised, grown-up enough to go out on our own. We are wearing too much eyeliner and not enough layers for Winnipeg in late winter, but somehow we don’t feel the cold. I am nervous when the waiter comes around, shy about my braces, and rehearse my order in my head. We trade slices of gooey, cheesy pizza and talk over each other, about boys and clothes as though we know. When the bill comes, we test the patience of the waiter as we argue about splitting, or having multiple bills, struggling to do math on our napkins in the heady, distant days before smart phones. We shrug into our coats and stumble out, clambering into the backseat of someone's mom’s van, still babbling. My best friend reaches into her pocket with a conspiratorial look and pulls out an overflowing handful of candy she grabbed from the bowl at the hostess stand. She hands me one. It’s peppermint.
I am an anxious twenty-something, chewing my cheek. I am waiting for the interview to begin, pressing my fingernails into my palms, and trying not to look as frightened as I feel. I am wearing that dress and that blazer, the ones I always wear for interviews, and those shoes, too - the ‘one hour’ shoes, as I think of them, as in, I can comfortably wear them for one hour, and no more. A young woman arrives, with a kind face and an empty mug. She tells me that my interviewer is late, but on his way, and offers me something to drink - coffee, perhaps? I do not drink coffee: it smells delicious, and tastes like wet, dirty carpet. I ask if she has tea. She has, and bustles off without another word. She returns just as quickly, with a steaming mug in her hand. I sip this tea throughout the interview, and it steadies my nerves. It’s peppermint.
Jennifer
Losing the Thread
Winter is a good time to find things to do inside, and in my infinite wisdom, I decided on some sewing and knitting this winter. The knitting is coming along splendidly. The sewing - not so much. In part, that is probably because knitting patterns are reasonably easy to hunt down, I have a willing and patient friend, a much better knitter than I am, who routinely untangles my mistakes, and I am lucky to have two excellent wool shops within walking distance of my home. Sewing patterns, on the other hand, have proven to be much trickier to acquire, and fabric is even worse. If I had, like any good Victorian girl, learned to sew at my grandmother’s knee, well, then this would be quite a different story. My grandmothers, on both sides, could make all sorts - often, without a pattern, which, to my inexperienced mind, is akin to magic.
Without their help, however, I am left to muddle through on my own. I’m sure that, by their metric, the projects I am attempting are laughably easy, the sort of thing they’d whip up in an afternoon for fun. For me, however, they pose some serious problems. I have spent several days now, crouched on my office floor like a goblin, hunched over a few yards of precious fabric (okay, some old bedsheets), re-inventing the wheel, as it were, and thinking to myself “There must be a better way to do this!” And there definitely is, dear reader - but I don’t know it. The answer to many of my queries and hiccoughs seems to be ‘get thee a grandmother.’ I’m sure my grandmothers, for example, could have told me that I ought to learn French seams or binding or flat felling instead of overlocked stitches to finish seams. And they definitely would have pointed out that the typical order of operations for sewing is darts, tucks and pleats before interfacings, which comes before shoulder seams, which comes before waist seams, which comes before hemming, and that buttons and buttonholes come last of all. I’m sure the expert sewists among you are rolling your eyes, thinking that, well, of course that’s how you do it! And you’re right, that is how you do it - if you know! Which, as I’m sure is becoming more and more obvious, I do not!
I read sewing manuals from Anne’s time and grind my teeth thinking about all the women who could do what I am trying and usually failing to achieve with ease long before they reached my age - the wrap skirt or simple blouse I am fighting with would have been nothing against the skills of a Victorian teenager. But all that sewing, all those years of experience and generations of knowledge are fading. The threads of all that skill have snapped. I am often directed to the internet to solve my problems and fill in the gaps left by a patchy self-education, but it is very tricky to troubleshoot with the internet. Were she still with us, I could have asked Grandma Rose how to perfect the tension on my sewing machine, and she could have bent forward over my work and pointed with skilled, deft fingers at where I had gone wrong. The internet is sometimes helpful, I grant you - but it cannot hold a candle to a living, breathing person, one who cares about you, who will click her tongue and tell you that your waist placement is off, and you’d better start again, and then soothe your harrowed up feelings when you’re all done with a cup of tea and a lemon tart.
But I am alone in my office, with only a small dusty grey cat by way of supervision, and thus far she has offered little in the way of help. Mostly she sits on the fabric and gets in the way, but she is very charming, and she purrs splendidly. So I consult the interwebs, and scour books, and rip out seams and start again, wishing someone would come along and say, “No, dear, this way.” But perhaps, if I am mule-minded enough, I will force my way through all the mistakes and do-overs, and one day I will be someone’s grandmother, bending over their work, pointing, with hands like Rose’s, and saying “This way.”
Jennifer
In the garden
I live about an hour’s walk from a botanical garden, and when it isn’t, you know, the worst time of the year, I try to go at least once a week. Now is not the time for visits to the gardens: the streets are sloppy and slick with ice melt and slush, everything is filthy, covered in a grimy layer of dingy grey or brown, and everyone’s mouths have settled into a grimace - we are over this weather, and have been for weeks. The gardens are not joyful in March. The trees are still frozen and rattle in the wind, and the dry, lifeless husks of rose bushes and creeping vines make the usually-lively grounds feel like a graveyard.
But, oh, dear listener, when spring finally, finally does come - then, there is nothing better than the long stroll to the gardens, and the even longer and more delightful stroll through them. The sun is golden and warm and the air suggestive of blossoms, of damp earth, of compost, of dew-soaked grass. There are birds twittering again, making up for lost time. A green haze has settled itself on the wet black boughs of trees - tiny buds are bursting open with impatient, insistent, pent-up life. The sky is bluer than it has been for a long time, but not quite the deep, blinding blue of summer; this is a gentler blue, still shaking off the grey of winter.
Once inside the gardens, you’ll find a main paved road that bisects the grounds, and snaking off from it are gravel paths and dirt tracks, and sometimes just faint suggestions of tamped down grass to follow. They will take you past the willow trees that trail their lazy branches into the duck pond, leaving rippling shadows on the water lilies and the ducks themselves, who keep up a merry patter. They will lead you through the rose gardens, where delicate, brilliant flowers send out their heady sent, each with an impressive pedigree and names like floribunda, polyantha, damask, grandiflora, rugosa, zephirine, and, bizarrely, David Austin. Rocky outcroppings will lead you through hardy bushes of steppe thistle, poppy, and blue sage, down through the kitchen and medecine garden, where calendula, lemon balm, lavender, echinacea, and valerian, those wise old healers, are ready to greet you. There are gardens flanked with cherry blossom and Japanese magnolia, a personal favourite, standing guard over rock gardens and floating lotus blooms. Phalanxes of tulips show off their colours in spring, some with ruffled petals, or stripes, or lacey edged blossoms, their heads bobbing in line after line, welcoming the warm weather.
The world becomes…still, in this garden. Right in its centre, you will find the whir and rush of traffic grows quiet, so that you can believe, even if only for a short time, that you are not in a busy city. You’ll find your breathing slow, deepen, and your shoulders will drop. The troubles of daily life melt away, and you’ll find yourself with the pleasantest of company - the nodding, friendly flowers, their beatified faces turned towards you. All memory of winter will fade.
Jennifer
One, two, buckle my shoe…
They were perfect, reader. Glittery, purple plastic sandals, waterproof, even, that I could buckle myself! They weren’t my first pair of shoes, nor my last, but they left a lasting impression. I still think of those glittery purple jelly sandals, of the deep-down-comfortable feeling of certainty they gave me, and sigh a little for a simpler time. It is by way of a stereotype that women are very keen on shoes, although there are a fair few sneaker heads among the male population, too. The dress historian Linda Przybyszewski has suggested that people began to focus a lot more of their attention on shoes when hats were slowly but surely eradicated from daily wear, to our detriment. Hats can be dyed, re-shaped, brightened or altered with flowers and a new hat band or a jaunty feather, and they can be sculptural, complex, fascinating, or deceptively simple, while being quite comfortable to wear. Plus, they draw attention to the face. Shoes, on the other hand, are usually not ideal for DIY makeovers, and the more sculptural and interesting they become, the less lovely they are to wear. And, as Przybyszewski points out, the fabulous ones draw our eyes down to the feet, or at least the bottom half of the wearer - literally the opposite end of the body from where, I would hope, we want most focus!
But, of course, none of those concerns ever entered my mind as a pre-schooler with those purple jelly sandals. There is a somewhat controversial book called Art and Agency by the art critic, anthropologist, and theorist Alfred Gell, and while I don’t agree with everything he posits, one of his points stands out when I recall those purple sandals. Gell argues that decoration isn’t superfluous - it really matters! He gives the example of a child’s bedsheets, saying that it is much easier to get a little boy to go to bed willingly if his bedsheets are emblazoned with images of a beloved superhero. Does a pattern of flying Supermans help the sheets do their job? Well, according to Gell, yes, they do! Sure, a set of plain white sheets would cover a bed just as admirably, but they would not be as appealing to the child in question, so the added decoration is vital to the function of the sheets and, very likely, to the sanity of the beleaguered parent! Similarly, I probably put on my jelly sandals more eagerly than I might have put on plain, boring old sandals, especially if their buckles were tricky for my pudgy little fingers. As we discussed in this week’s episode, Victorian children did sometimes have to contend with clothes that were not built with their motor skills in mind. That way of thinking about kids and their clothes wouldn’t take place until the 1920s! That’s when people not only decided that little kids needed garments that responded to their bodies and abilities, not just tiny versions of adult clothing, but also began to think about children as living in a really specific stage of life, one quite distinct from adulthood. In fact, my strappy jelly sandals with their easy buckle were the descendents of children’s shoes from the 1920s, when little buckled sandals and shoes became a popular alternative to laced shoes for kids who hadn’t yet learned to tie a bunny knot.
You’ll be delighted to learn that I have, in fact, mastered tied shoes and have moved on from velcro and slip-on shoes so popular with the kindergarten set, dear reader. And yet, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my purple glitter jelly sandals - the sense of control they gave me, and how unabashedly I liked them, how pretty I thought them. If you see a pair in your worldly travels, you could let me know.
Jennifer
Rose-coloured Glass
In my misspent youth, I briefly toyed with medieval art history, before modern weaving (!) and Anni Albers (!!) sunk their teeth into me, and neither have let go since. In many ways, dear reader, I still get to dabble in medieval subjects - the Bauhaus, like the Arts and Crafts Movement before them, were inspired by medieval guilds and artisans, after all. Part of the reason I was so tempted was stained glass. Photographs do not do it justice: 12th or 13th century stained glass, with its characteristic deep blue and blood red, glows like gems, making even the most sparse and colourless cathedral seem to radiate light like a jewellery box, or a reliquary, studded with precious stones. For medieval congregations, stepping into a cathedral thusly decorated was akin to making a brief visit to heaven - the stained glass windows with their unearthly light, the flickering candle flame illumiating the friezework and frescoes, making the interior design programme come alive, the heady scent of incense spiraling upwards, the unseen, disembodied voices of choral singing filling the space - it was all working to transport people to another plane of existence. Talk about bells and smells!
I was particularly taken with Tree of Jesse windows. These are window ‘types’, which is to say that there are a lot of them, and they more or less contain the same kinds of imagery. Put simply, the biblical figure Jesse reclines at the bottom of the window, and a ‘tree’ (ahem) sprouts from his body, showing us the metaphorical family tree of Christ, with each branch dedicated to one of his ancestors: Jesse, then David, then twenty-seven other guys, then Christ, right at the top. These windows have been around a long time, and for much of their early history, the person who preceded Christ on the family tree was Joseph. Do you see a problem? Joseph was not meant to be blood-related to Christ - whoops!
So somewhere around the 12th century, espeically in France, people began to substitute Mary for Joseph - makes a bit more sense, all things considered. Around the same time, Mary was becoming a much more prominent figure: she’d started out as little more than set dressing, a kind of human chair for Christ, and suddenly she was a main character, with a backstory and parents and a personality (sort of) - the whole lot. She got her own colours and symbols and everything. Nice one, Mary. And people used the metaphor of stained glass to understand some of Mary’s more, shall we say, peculiar, characteristics. A virgin birth is a lot of wrap your head around, so people linked the way light passes through glass without breaking it as a comparison to explain Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. As we discussed in this week’s episode, glass was rife with metaphor and meaning for the Victorians, and it seems like the same was true for Medieval Christians trying to parse the trickier bits of their developing doctrine.
The medieval world saw everything as a dichotomy, a sort of binary, with opposites paired together to create balance. The physical world was balanced with the spiritual one; sin counteracted holiness; darkness went with light. But the stained glass windows of cathedrals and abbeys were a sort of bridge, a place where the earthly and the divine coalesced. I think the Victorians felt a similar kind of resonance in their understanding of glass: windows and mirrors were, for them, liminal spaces, places where reality touched the dream world, where a lonely orphan might meet a looking-glass friend. Material, and immaterial; solid, and transparent; obscuring and revealing; reflecting and extending - glass held a kind of magic. And maybe, if the light hits just right, it still does.
Jennifer
Of Mice and Milne
I am a big fan of children’s literature. There, I said it. I have strongly held opinions about kids’ books, many of which would make me deeply unpopular with the majority of English-speaking Canada, so I choose to keep them to myself…mostly. On a little dedicated shelf in my office, you will find current gems cheek-by-jowl with old classics and some surviving copies from my own childhood. Picture books and beginner novels, books of poetry and nursery rhymes, fairytales and folklore - it’s all there. You’ll find a startling number of protagonist mice and rabbits, which the author and critic Bruce Handy posits as popular choices because children, also being small and relatively powerless in a big, wide, wild world, connect with them. From an illustrator’s point of view, I think it might also be because rabbits and mice are easier to draw than children, and much cuter in little jackets, but what do I know?
Most historical children’s books did not feature mice or rabbits or bears or Heffalumps - they were religious tracts about either extremely horrible children who died young and went to Hell, or extremely saintly children who died young and went to Heaven. Not great choices, all things considered. It puts me in mind of Jane Eyre, who, when asked how she will avoid the fire and brimstone of Hell, responds boldly that she must “keep well and not die.” Wise words from a ten-year-old.
But much like the prayers and hymns found in the Peep of Day series mentioned in this week’s chapter, the texts of these many and varied children’s books on my shelf have become a sort of shorthand in my family - books like The House at Pooh Corner and The World of Christopher Robin were such common reading fodder in my childhood home that snippets of poems and stories and the gentle jokes Milne included have taken up residence in the Burgess family dialect. There are a handful of Sherry Fitch poems that are similarly well-represented. A series of picture books by Lynley Dodd about local village cats were particular favourites, and her rhymes show up quite a lot, too - perhaps unsurprising, given how fond we are of our felines. Even the briefest mention of these literary allusions is sure to raise a smile, and it’s always nice to have material that you know will land.
That got me thinking, while writing this week’s episode, about how powerful those prayer books must have been. The children’s books that punctuated my childhood are only foundational in my immediate family: my husband didn’t grow up with them, so instead of a knowing smile, when I say to him “I’m looking down, Pooh,” or “Scarface Claw, the Toughest Tom in Town” or “And one night, invaders came,” the best I can expect is raised brows. But the prayers and precepts and pericopes (isn’t that a delicious word?) that made up the prayer books and cards in Anne’s world would have been nearly universal for the ‘small fry’ of Avonlea. It must have been very comforting, very assuring, for every child in a generation to have the same touchstones - everyone would know the same songs, and rhymes, and hymns, and prayers, and references to those texts. Those books were also likely to have been foundational to the ‘big fry’ of Avonlea - the adults would likely have read similar tracts, and certainly would be reading and praying from the same versions of the Bible. This sort of cultural continuity is born out in the later installments of the Anne series: when Anne has moved to far-flung places (okay, other towns in PEI), she and all her new chums and bosom friends can quote at length, and do, not only religious texts, but also classical literature and poetry - and everyone gets the references. We can guess that Montgomery did this in her own life, because of the words she not only puts in her characters’ mouths, but on the frontispiece of the novel itself: she quotes a line from Robert Browning’s Evelyn Hope: “And the stars met in your aspect/made of fire and dew.” She must have assumed, probably rightly, that her readers would understand that reference and to what it alluded.
I admit that family in-jokes about Winnie the Pooh or The Old Ladies Who Liked Cats (a marvelous book, now sadly out of print) may not be as erudite as Browning or the Bible, but I think their functions are similar: just like Anne, and Montgomery, we have found words that delight us, and promptly borrow them wholesale for our own use. But they are also a connective tissue, reifying the links between Anne and her friends, or between my family, textual threads that bind us together.
Jennifer
Talking Shop
In this week’s episode, we spend some time talking about parlours and the often-rigid structures that surrounded social visits. But one of my biggest motivators for starting this audio series in the first place was quite a different kind of visiting. When I was away at school, my close friends lived within walking distance of me, and we regularly gathered, often on a kind of rota, at this house or that apartment, curled up on second-hand sofas with mis-matched mugs of tea clutched in our hands, to wile away our free hours talking. Sometimes the conversations were fluffy nonsense - clothes and the latest movie playing at the tiny independent theatre in town, horror stories from our assistant jobs and plans for summer holidays. But best of all were the nights when we lifted the shop-talk ban and let the conversation go where it willed. Sure, we still talked about saving up for a new pair of shoes, but headier subjects joined the mix - Marshall McLuhan, or the sculptures at Orsanmichele, or the British Library’s archives, or the overwhelm upon seeing that doryphoros: no, not that one, the other one.
For me, these late night tete-a-tete’s made my homesickness and the following week’s looming presentation shrink, if for only a few hours. At least in part, The Reader’s Museum is a way for me to recreate those earnest, eager late nights, surrounded by friends and brimming over with dreams, ambitions - hope. Grad school can be a challenging time, but it was also thrilling to find so many people, all in one place, who were just as keen as I was to think about the best way to install a Bauhaus weaving, or who exalted at the upcoming trip to the big city to see that travelling miniatures show. These were my kind of folks - they also went exclusively to museums when they travelled, and spent their time in a gallery at break-neck pace, trying to see just about everything in a collection, sprinting from the special exhibitions to this wing or to that hall and then back through those rooms to see that can’t-miss oil painting, taking a few moments to pay respects to that thing they studied once, with a quick stop off at the gift shop before it closed, an experience I affectionately call ‘the museum marathon.’
Were we insufferable? Of course, most grad students are. But we were also, I think, happy. I certainly was. We were sponges, soaking up as much knowledge and readings and experiences (and items for our CV) as we could squeeze in to what felt at that time like a never-ending parade of books and papers and grading and language credits and seminars and conferences and exhibitions and supervision meetings and deadlines and citations and archives, but was over in the blink of an eye. I miss those days, dear reader. And those late-night chat sessions, where we talked of ‘cabbages and kings’, seem to me like the glue that held it all together, the way we decompressed and prepared to dive back in, the pauses that punctuated what was otherwise a headlong rush towards what we were promised would be bright and shiny futures. In a later installment of the Anne series, one Captain Jim welcomes Anne and her friends by saying that ‘it won’t take long to spend an hour.’ In retrospect, didn’t take long for the years of grad school to slip by, either. So I’m glad for these episodes, and for the Reader’s Museum - in its imagined walls, I’m back on those lumpy sofas, tea in hand, setting the world to rights with my friends.
Jennifer
Pulling Back the Curtains
When I go on walks in the late afternoon, when my workday has come to an end and I am walking off the weight of the day, the windows in my neighbourhood are lighted as everyone around me arrives home after their workday, and settles in for the night. I keep my eyes peeled for dogs out on their evening walks, and smile at the fearless squirrels in the park, and glance at the windows, glowing yellow in the snapping air of winter. In the summertime, the windows are dark because everyone is out, enjoying the park or playing in the back lane or sitting out on their front porches, but in winter, the streets are empty, the houses are full, and the lights are on. I count the number of windows I see that have the same curtains I do in my windows. You know the ones - they’re white, translucent cotton, with vertical lines and little machine-embroidered dots by way of texture, and yes, they do come from the giant, flat-pack home goods store that rhymes with idea. Sometimes, the ubiquity of these curtains irks me. When I return home, I glare at the ones hanging in my windows, and wish I had something more interesting or unique. But then I remember that my best friend, who lives many thousands of miles away and who, if I’m lucky, I get to see once or twice a year, has those curtains, too.
The more I examine objects from the past, the more I keep coming back to two thoughts. The first is that humans have been spending most of our time trying to solve the same problems, again and again, in different ways and with varying levels of success. We’re trying to get enough good food, stay warm and look good, avoid bad weather, and bump along with each other - everything else is extra. But the second thought that usually follows this one is that there aren’t really solutions: just trade offs. My curtains are the same as everyone else’s, and come from a massive global corporation. I have no connection with the person who made them (or, more likely, the person running the machines that made them), or even the people who sell them. In exchange for that distance, though, I get a cheap product (in all senses of that word) that I can find just about anywhere in the world, and that, should the need arise, I can replace at a moment’s notice. And that availability means that lots of other people have them, too, which, in a way, connects me with people all over the world. They may not be especially good curtains, but their ubiquity - the very thing I sometimes find frustrating about them - is their selling point.
And there are lots of things like this - global soda brands that are basically the same everywhere, so universal and available that their branding is iconic and their absence more unusual than their presence. You could say the same thing about mass-printed books, with the same type face and number of pages and words in the same order. We readily accepted these products because they were, and are, cheap, available, and best of all, predictable. And they connect us - I smile a little at the person on the bus reading the same copy of a book as the one on my shelf, and there can be comfort in buying a familiar can of soda from a vending machine when we find ourselves far from home. But perhaps, as we flung our arms wide to embrace these products, we let go of other things - specificity, personal expression, local identity, skills, and the handmade. See what I mean? No solutions: just trade offs.
This afternoon, when I go out for my daily walk, I’ll think differently about those white curtains hanging in other people’s windows. Maybe I’ll think of my friend, or imagine some of the other homes where these curtains hang, and try to appreciate them for what they are. I think, though, that the feeling of having lost something, of having realised that loss too late, will be hard to shake.
Jennifer
Cold Feet
You know the little battle you have with yourself, about getting out of bed in winter? Getting up in the summer is a breeze - the sun is up, peeking through the curtains and practically singing you out of bed. It’s warm, but not too hot - a perfect time for a walk, to admire people’s gardens and see as many dogs out for their walks as possible. Plus, all this delight is happening at what would typically be an ungodly hour, so you have the rest of your day in front of you - what could be better? But, dear reader, we are not in the Merry Month of May - it is still January. I lay awake this morning, well before 6 am, dreading the impending alarm, and knowing in my heart of hearts that I would have to put my feet on the floor, where they would immediately freeze and stay frozen the rest of the day. I fought with myself - the upper part of my mind listing off the things I had to accomplish this morning, while the lower, reptilian part of my brain simply hissed ‘waaaarrrrrmmm’ and rolled over without another word. In just a few minutes, I will have to put on every piece of clothing I own and brave the frigid temperatures and the windchill, the snow blustering and the death rattle of the wind, which seems to blow directly in your face no matter which way you turn.
I was reminded this morning, though, of a section of the great Ruth Goodman’s How to Be A Victorian in which she extolls the virtues of mats or rugs, especially in the bedroom. (Also, if you haven’t read Goodman’s How to Be A Victorian or any of her other works, run, don’t walk - they are splendid. She is a social historian who spends months or years living in different periods of history, some of which are filmed and available online for FREE, dear reader, and much of which she has published in her many books. Also, she is hilarious. I promise this isn’t sponsored by Ruth Goodman: I’m just a fan.) Textiles of just about any sort were expensive, so even second-hand mats or rugs made from scraps, like Marilla's braided rugs, would have been out of reach for many people. But what a difference they make! As much as I whinge and moan about getting out of bed and feeling cold the rest of the day, I can (and should) be grateful for a rug by my bedside, and a heated home - no fires or potbelly stoves required! In a Victorian house, the presence or absence of a floor covering to mitigate the cold might have taken the chill out of the morning for those who got up before the fires were lit. All this to say that I am feeling the winter blues pretty intensely this morning, dear reader, but warmed slightly (very slightly) at the thought of my rug and knowing that, joy of joys, I will return to the warmth and comfort of my bed (complete with heavy blanket and purring cat) before too long.
Jennifer
Chocolate Caramels
My grandfather smoked his whole life. As a child, I found the smell of his tobacco unbearable, and my mother, on more than one occasion, had to hang my clothes and soft toys out in the bitter cold of January to get rid of the clinging, permeating odours of tobacco after a visit to his house. But, decades later, when hunting through a sagging stack of hand-me-down linens from his home, long after he had passed, I unexpectedly pulled out a handful of his handkerchiefs. That earthy, acrid perfume of lingering tobacco hit me in the face like a flat palm and staggered me - suddenly, I was a pre-schooler, skidding, sock-footed, on the polished floors of the hallway that bisected his house, coming in from climbing the craggy apple tree and leaving apples for the deer on his front step, watching the progress of my little yogurt cup boat in the creek that snaked through his backyard. There was chocolate milk on offer in his house, a special kind that I didn’t have at home, and if I think about it long enough, I can recall the way it tasted. It’s funny how smells and tastes seem to reach back farther into our memories than just about anything else, pulling us into times long since forgotten.
I suspect that the old-fashioned candies Anne raves about in this week’s chapter might have similar effects - pop one in your mouth and be transported to the carefree days of youth, recalling the sorts of candies that your great-aunt might put out in little cut-glass bowls (or is that just me?) Whether from nostalgia, or simply a taste for chocolatey, melt-in-your-mouth sweets, or both, people have loved and clamoured for chocolate candies - just like the ones about which Anne waxes poetic.
To that end, dear reader, let us turn our attention to recipes. On the 6th of March, 1881, the New York Times published the following recipe for chocolate caramels:
“Take of grated chocolate, milk, molasses, and sugar, each one cupful, and a piece of butter the size of an egg; boil until it will harden when dropped into cold water; add vanilla; put in a buttered pan, and before it cools mark off in square blocks. ”
I am here to warn you off, dear reader: this recipe produces a sort of incorrigible chocolate sludge, which cannot be corralled into the ‘square blocks’ as directed, because it refuses to harden. Besides, who measures butter in eggs? What is going on? Instead, I offer you a modern version, which is, admittedly, rather more like fudge - but still delicious. This recipe comes from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook by Kate Macdonald.
Ingredients:
1 c (240 g) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
3 oz (85 g) semi-sweet chocolate
1 1/4 c (380 g) sweetened condensed milk
1/4 c (80 g) corn syrup
2 1/4 c (495) firmly packed brown sugar
Instructions:
Butter an 8 x 8 (20 cm x 20 cm) baking pan and set aside.
Put your butter, chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, corn syrup, and brown sugar in a large, heavy saucepan. Mix with a wooden spoon.
Place the saucepan over medium heat, bring the mixture to a boil, and let the chocolate melt completely.
Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook the mixture for 30 minutes. It should boil gently all the while, but not too vigorously. Stir the mixture constantly with the wooden spoon. The candy will burn easily if it is not mixed. Call it an arm workout, and focus on how delicious your candy will be when you’re done!
When it’s cooled, the candy will be very thick. Pour it into the baking pan and set it on a cooling rack.
Let the candy cool completely, about 1 1/2 hours, before cutting it into 3/4-inch (2 cm) squares. Put out a stacked plateful in the centre of your next knitting circle or quilting bee, and watch them disappear! Enjoy!
Jennifer