Vincent very well have been murdered. Naifeh and Smith make a very compelling case and their book is meticulously, thoroughly and lovingly researched. A long read but never a slog.
Tree Roots and Trunks Vincent van Gogh Painting, Oil on Canvas Auvers-sur-Oise: July, 1890 Van Gogh Museum another painting from Vincent’s last days
The Sound of summer includes the sound of flip flops.
Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Flip-flop.
Even in places where flip flops aren’t the best choice. Like anyplace that isn’t a beach.
You can hear them coming. And going. Without looking at feet, you know what’s on them.
Flip-flop.
So while the girl was asking, “Have you ever heard of a drink called…..a flap?” I was hearing flip-flops.
I asked her if she meant
“Frappe”
And she smiled real big and said, Yes, THAT’S it!” and her sister got closer, and her Mom and there were others and it was hard to tell who was together-together and who was just together as in there in the moment together.
FRAPPES photograph by Kang Kim, Prop Styling by Lauren Evans, Styling by Karen Evans/Apostrophe
So I describe how a frappe was a milkshake with ice cream, and if they ordered a milkshake ‘round these parts, they were likely to get shook milk, no ice cream.
Her sister asked, “But where’s the
RUM?”
Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Flip-flop.
Yo
Both girls were under the age of 12 so rum drinks weren’t what I first thought of when this line of questioning began, and then I remembered….
“FLIP?
Are you asking about Flip?
Now everyone was smiling and nodding….
Now, thanks to Paula Marcoux I know from flip.
Beer, rum, molasses, hot poker, done.
I know oodles of other things from her, too, but flip and rum had come up recently, and put her in my thoughts, and memories of flips past…. in the way rum drinks do here in New England. It’s not exactly flip season here, with temperatures and humidity both in the high ‘80’s, but no season is truly far from another here in New England, so soon enough it will be flip appropriate time.
illustration fro Rum: A Global History
I had recently been flipping through Mrs. Child’s (Lydia Maria, not Julia) “American Frugal Housewife”, the way one does in the food history biz.
I was (and still am) wrestling with the differences/different-name-for-the-same-thing conundrum between flapjacks, slapjacks and flatjacks. In short, sorting out the Jack branch of the fritter family.
Which started with Johnnycake and Hoe Cake, and is detouring through Pancake, with short stops in Griddle Cake, Mush Cake and Corn Cake……
While looking at pancakes, and I saw this:
Pancakes
“…A spoonful or two of N.E. rum makes pancakes light. Flip makes very nice pancakes. In this case, nothing is done but to sweeten your mug of beer with molasses; put in one glass of N.E. rum; heat it till it foams, by putting in a hot poker; and stir it up with flour as thick as other pancakes.”
Child, Mrs. The American Frugal Housewife, 12th Boston: Carter, Hendee and Co. 1832. Reprinted 1980. p. 74.
Paula’s has directions for flip (with a photo step by step) in Cooking With Fire. And she has notes on these pancakes in the appendix, where she recommends adding a pinch of salt and an egg. And cook them in bacon grease. All good.
I’m still thinking about rum in pancakes……with blueberry pancakes and cinnamon? With rum butter? Are these supper pancakes rather than breakfast pancakes?
So I told the girls about flip pancakes, too.
And then I wondered – what sort of New England Colonial Educational Experience was this family on that involved Flip? Cause that’s the field trip that I want to go on.
I have more RUM books then I thought – all that Living Proof at Plimoth Plantation
Because a certain someone has a BIRTHDAY TODAY …and one of his ulterior motives to help me with the technical aspects of a blog was to have access to his favorite recipes….another of Grandma B’s recipes.
Mrs. Granatowicz’s Casserole
(Mrs. G was a LEIGH, NEBR- neighbor-)
A JACOB Favorite
1 ½ lbs. hamburger
1 C chopped celery
1 C chopped onion
2 Tb Oil or Butter
1 sm can mushrooms chopped
1 can cream of mushroom Soup undiluted
1 can cream of Chicken Soup undiluted
1 can Chinese Noodles
brown onions & celery in butter
mix soups together Add the above to soups.
brown hamburger , then add #1 & 2
You can add ½ can bean sprouts or/& water chestnuts. I usually DO NOT. Also, you can leave out the can of mushrooms – I usually use these.
Chop corn, drain, and add dry ingredients mixed and sifted, then add yolks of eggs, beaten until thick, and fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff. Cook in a frying-pan in fresh hot lard. Drain on paper.
Farmer, Fannie Merritt. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Boston: Little, Brown, 1918; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/87/.
And Corn Fritters have
aliases.
Why??? Why, are they ashamed of being corn? Or is the fritter part too frivolous? Do they just want to be taken more seriously? Or is it role-playing, cos-play for fritters??
They are also known as….
Corn Oysters
CORN OYSTERS
Mix well together one quart grated sweet corn, two tea-cups sweet milk, one tea-cup flour, one tea-spoon butter, two eggs well beaten; season with pepper and salt, and fry in butter like griddlecakes. – Mrs. H. B. S.
-1877. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping. p.35.
Eastern Oysters
They do not taste particularly oystery, these fritters of CORN. They taste fried, like the fried part of a fried oyster, but only someone who has never had an oyster, or never been near an oyster or had ever spent any amount of time imagining oysters would be fooled.
And why fool them? Why the charade? Why the name change? Why Mock Oysters?
Pacific Oyster
Mock Oysters
MOCK OYSTERS OF CORN.
Take a dozen and a half ears of large young corn, and grate all the grains off the cob as fine as possible. Mix with the grated corn three large table-spoonfuls of sifted flour, the yolks of six eggs well beaten. Let all be well incorporated by hard beating.
Have ready in a frying-pan an equal proportion of lard and fresh butter. Hold it over the fire till it is boiling hot, and then put in a portion of the mixture as nearly as possible in shape and size like fried oysters. Fry them brown, and send them to the table hot. They should be near an inch thick.
This is an excellent relish at breakfast, and may be introduced as a side dish at dinner. In taste it has a singular resemblance to fried oysters. The corn must be young.
Grunt, Buckler, Crisp and Crumble. Add some Cobblers and Pan-dowdies. Betties. We mustn’t leave out the Betties. These are the Goldie-Oldies of the fruit and butter and flour, baked in a dish but not quite a pie, classic New England treats.
These ‘Olde-Thymie’ treats just aren’t as oldie as they like to pass themselves off as. But, since they’re now nearing their centennial….well, I guess they’re old at last!
Welcome to the Colonial Revival! When the New Fashion was to be old-fashioned even though you’re new…..Old Days Old Ways the way they never were…rather like the Bi-Centennial…..we just never stop reinventing the past.
Orchard House circa 1940. Home of Louisa May Alcott in Concord MA – this is where she wrote Little Women. She nicknamed the house “Apple Slump”.
I can’t remember not knowing cobblers, and crisps and crumbles…..and knowing there was some extensional difference between them even if I couldn’t articulate it.But I remember quite clearly when I first heard about Apple Slump – The summer between third and fourth grade.
The Christmas before Aunt Eileen (Grampy’s only sister) had given me several brown paper bags FULL of books. She felt it was important to have books on hand, before you thought you could be ready for them, lined up and ready for you when you were ready for them. Chapter books. Book with more words then picture books. And one of them was :
And – I’d seen the movie! Twice!
The Katherine Hepburn one….
and
the 1949 version with June Allyson
I’ve since seen the 1994 – of course!
Hello Winona and Susan Sarandon
Anyhow, I must have looked Louisa May Alcott up in the encyclopedia…that’s a big set of books we used to go to to find stuff out before the internet…..and found out that she called her house Apple Slump.Actually, the house was named Orchard House – Apple Slump was it’s nickname. A house with a pet name!
The first food Apple Slump reference is in a Salem MA newspaper 2 years before Louisa’s birth
20 November 1830, Salem (MA) Observer, pg. 2, col. 3:
The pumpkin pies and apple slump, bacon and plum-pudding, were smoking on the table, when the old gentleman, gathering round him his smiling guests, said grace in the following manner: “May God bless us, and what is provided for us.”
Slump
Pare, core and slice 6 apples and combine with one c(up). sugar, 1 t(easpoon) cinnamon, and 1/2 c. water in a saucepan. Cover and beat to boiling point. Meanwhile sift together 1 1/2 c. flour, t t/4 t. salt and 1 1/2 t. baking powder and add 1/2 cup milk to make a soft dough. Drop pieces of the dough from a tablespoon onto apple mixture, cover, and cook over low heat for 30 min. Serve with cream.”
—John F. Mariani. Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, (p. 297)
And then there was the day we invented coffee cake.
Since most of Europe wasn’t all that into coffee in 1627, it’s really much more impressive then it sounds.
But we were young…..and we knew so little
Seriously, young. What I looked like c. 1981.
What I thought I looked like….Millet, for want of a 17th century role model (then – remember – no internet!)
It started out simply as baking.
Bread.
We baked and baked and baked. We baked just about everyday. We learned a lot about bread very quickly. But we did not know that there were actual 17th century instructions for bread. And we had the assumptions of the 1970’s – remember the Bi-Centennial? – to guide us.
We didn’t know about this recipe. No internet. Not that many books on food history.
Basic bread – Four ingredients.
Flour. Water. Salt. Leaven.
We got it.
We made bread that looked like the bread in the 17th century paintings.
And we learned to use the wood fired oven, before EVERYONE had a wood fired oven. And we were good at it. We saw the potential to use pizza as a training tool to learn about the wood fired oven.
Massive buy-in. Who wouldn’t want to help for pizza?
We got….a little bored by four, just four, always the same four, ingredients…
So we started
…..adding things.
Many things you can add to bread and they rather disappear in the loaf, at least visually.
A little sugar. We used brown sugar then – because we didn’t have sugar loaves and most of us didn’t know we should want them.
1720
Because obviously brown sugar is more Oldie- Timie, right?
Butter. To make it richer.
A little milk Ditto.
A few eggs….why not?
Got hens? Use hen-fruit!
Not all at once, not every time, but more things, more frequently.
And then a few spices crept in.
Cinnamon
Ginger
Nutmeg
Cloves
Hmmmmm – that could be a song…..
Of All the Birds
Of all the birds that ever I see
The owl is the fairest in her degree:
For all the day long she sits on a tree
And when the night cometh away flies she.
Tu whit — Tu whoo,
To whom drink’st thou? — Sir Knave, to thee.
My song is well sung, I’ll make you a vow
That he is a knave that drinketh now.
Nose, nose, nose, nose,
And who gave thee thy jolly red nose?
Cinnamon and ginger, nutmeg and cloves:
that gave me my jolly red nose.
And then
Raisins.
More properly, raisins of the sunn.
Raisins and Currents – both are dried grapes, just different sized grapes.
The thing with raisins, is that everyone can see them.
Sometimes they are mistaken for flies….sometimes they concealed flies…….but with raisins you’ve made raisin bread, and everyone knows what that is.
So you learn to put the raisins in last and pull the un-raisined dough down around them….
We thought we’d made cinnamon raisin bread. But really, we had re-invented Gervase Markham’s Banbury Cake.
Because we didn’t know there were perfectly good cakes we could have made without any slights of hand and amazing feats of prestidigitation.
This was all in 1981 and 1982….it was Michael Best’s edition of The English Housewife where we saw the error – and genius – of our ways.
That wasn’t until 1986.
We didn’t see it as coffee cake, or think of it as coffee cake, and certainly didn’t call it coffee cake. Bread . It was Bread.
UNTIL a day in 1981…in the fall….and a reporter for the Boston Globe was there when we were taking the loaves out of the oven and asked if it was coffee cake.…..
1981 – Abraham Pearce in the 1627 Village. This was the story the papers had come for. Or Thanksgiving. They were always there for Thanksgiving.
We neither agreed nor disagreed.
We may have pointed out a passing flock of geese overhead. Or those hens squawking about….and goats, we probably pointed to the goats, frolicking and gamboling as goats do…..
Perhaps another housewife threw the dishwater out her door, yelling, “Ware Slops!” like we used to do.
We may have sung…..
We all held our collective breath until the picture ran in the paper. The coffee cake was merely identified as bread, although if you looked close you could see the raisins…..
Mix half a cupful of popped and rolled corn (Nelson’s is the best). And half a package of chopped raisins, one cupful of powdered sugar, the whites of two eggs and a tablespoon of flour together and drop on greased brown paper by the tablespoonsful and bake in a moderate oven until light brown.
Talbott, Mary Hamilton. Pop Corn Recipes. Grinnell, Iowa: Sam Nelson, Jr., Company, 1916. n.p. in In Andy Smith’s Popped Culture, University of South Carolina Press, 1999. p. 200.
The White House Cook Book was first released in 1894, and was updated regularly.
TO THE
WIVES OF OUR PRESIDENTS,
THOSE NOBLE WOMEN WHO HAVE GRACED THE
WHITE HOUSE
DEAR TO ALL AMERICANS,
THIS VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.
In between the recipes and household hints there are portraits of the first ladies…..all of them up to 1900 in this 1901 edition.
There are also menus for the whole year, of breakfast, dinner, and supper suggestions for each day of a week for each month of the year, as well as special whole day holiday menus.
New Year’s Day has a menu, as does Washington’s Birthday (which includes Washington Pie for dinner, but also English Pound Cake for supper…)
July begins with a
FOURTH OF JULY.
BREAKFAST.
Red Raspberries and Cream
Fried Chicken 86. Scrambled Tomatoes 196.
Warmed Potatoes 186. Tennessee Muffins 245.
Toast 268.
Coffee 487.
DINNER.
Clam Soup 46.
Boiled Cod 68., with Lobster Sauce 150.
Roast Lamb 136. With Mint Sauce 152.
New Potatoes Boiled 183.
Green Peas 201.Spinach with Eggs 202.
Cucumbers Sliced 167
Chicken Patties 85
Naple Biscuits 343. Vanilla Ice-cream 357.
Chocolate Macaroons 358. Strawberries.
Coffee 437.
SUPPER.
Cold Sliced Lamb 134.
Crab Pie 69. Water-cress Salad 168. Cheese Toast 264.
Graham Bread 234. Sponge Cake 277.
Blackberries. Tea 439.
p. 468 White House CB
I was interested to see Green Peas and New Potatoes for the Fourth, as well as Boiled Cod with Lobster Sauce, even though it’s not quite Poached Salmon and Egg Sauce…..
But wait –
are those
MACAROONS
for dessert at dinner?????
Macaroons again? You spend some time with a recipes, and it turns up EVERYWHERE
Although this time in chocolate….
Chocolate Macaroons
PUT three ounces of plain chocolate in a pan and melt on a slow fire; then work it to a thick paste with one pound of powdered sugar and the whites of three eggs; roll the mixture down to the thickness of about one-quarter of an inch; cut it in small, round pieces with a paste-cutter, either plain or scalloped; butter a pan slightly, and dust it with flour and sugar in equal quantities; place in it the pieces of paste or mixture, and bake in a hot but not too quick oven.
Ziemann, Hugo and Mrs. F. L. Gillette. The White House Cook Book. The Saalfield Publishing Co.: New York-Akron-Chicago. p. 353.
Can you name the five states that joined the Union in the 20th century?
