Louis Harrison Barnard’s Japanese Tea Set, with cosmos and calendula blossoms.
Archive for the ‘family’ Category
New work
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Our hardy ancestors. . .dog
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Here is a photo of my grandmother’s dog. She took the picture, so I imagine that shadow at the front of the photo is my grandmother. Her dog was known to be fiercely protective and not dependably obedient but he sits here for his picture – perhaps distracted by something over her shoulder. He looks like he might be a really good dog.
This is one of my favorite pictures in our vast collection of family snapshots. Together with the one below they were held in a tiny, fragile wooden frame with glass wired in, like they might have belonged to a young girl for a very long time.
I wish someone had written his name on the back one of these. No one knows it now.
Recommended reading
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Food from the Field My great-great grandfather bought this farm in 1863 and each successive generation made their living farming these acres. Those facts, according to the state of Illinois, qualify the land as a centennial farm. I grew up on this farm. Slopping the hogs, gathering the eggs, and helping Mom in the kitchen and garden were familiar chores. . .
FFF is a wonderful blog, full of recipes that really work, beautiful (and real) gardens and family celebrations. Now I feel like I have a better image of the seasons in the country’s center.
Old is the New New – Weird History. Mad Science. Occasional Robots.
This is the place to go to read about messianic architecture, the Kcymaerxthaere and right now, a link to HiLoBrow and an essay entitled “Holden’s History of the United States”, where J. D. Salinger meets Howard Zinn. In heaven, presumably. Go to ONN for the ultimate in synthesis - I do.
Backwards Beekeepers: all organic, chemical free, local populations – let the bees be bees!
These folks help me resist the magical solutions offered by the pesticide industry for all the woes and diseases of the modern honey bee. No matter what problem I’m fussing about, they’ve seen it and overcome. Well, except that I have a lot more sub-zero days than they do in California. Not their fault.
Lollyphile! Remember when candy was all you thought about?
I know people for whom it is impossible to buy an acceptable present. I send those people Absinthe lollypops because seriously, how could you not? And no need to repeat that gift – next year you can send them Maple Bacon!
The order by which people are admitted into Heaven.
It’s just an essay, but it’s my favorite essay so it gets a place in RR. You’ll remember this fondly just about forever.
Happy New Year Buns
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
This is a weird picture, but it’s the only one I have – we ate them too quickly. My family traditionally celebrates New Year’s Eve by staying in and eating dumplings. Tonight we made potstickers (fried and then steamed, made with unleavened dough) and baozi (steamed, leavened filled rolls). We also made a batch of shrimp, ginger, garlic, spinach and water chestnut filling and used it for both batches. Here’s the recipe for the baozi – you’ll need a bamboo or metal tiered steamer and a food processor.
1 Tbs active dry yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
2 tablespoons cooking oil
2 teaspoons sugar
1 egg
3 1/2 cups all-purpose wheat flour or bread flour, plus more as needed. You can also use rice flour, barley, whole wheat or corn meal as part of the dry ingredients.
Add flour, sugar and yeast to the bowl of a food processor. Pulse a few times to mix. Add water, oil and egg; process until well blended and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. This is a soft dough.
Let the dough rise until doubled in size, about 1 to 3 hours depending on the room temperature.
Stretch the dough out into a log with a diameter of about 2.5 inches. I generally let it lie coiled on a large cookie sheet lined with a Silplat. Using kitchen shears, cut the dough into 2 inch pieces (it should make around 25), and let rise again for at least 30 minutes. You can steam these plain for 20-25 minutes, or you can fill them, like we did tonight. Flatten a piece of dough in your hand (oiling your fingers first makes this easier). Holding the dough cupped in your palm, put about 2 tsp of filling in the middle and fold the edges up in a pleat, squeeze shut. I like to roll the opening underneath the bun so that it doesn”t show, but it’s also traditional to keep them upright, showing off their little topknots.
Any filling you can imagine works well with this dough. I’ve had spicy pork, red bean paste, homemade jam, cream cheese and strawberries, butter-sugar-cinnamon, bean curd and pineapple boazi – they’re all good.
Happy New Year!
Hardy Ancestors – Mincemeat
Monday, December 28th, 2009
I grew up in this house. There were cows wandering the first floor when my parents bought it in 1955 shortly after I was born. My father had adventures and tetanus shots ripping off the decrepit front porch and flipping the huge old floorboards over to hide the damage from the livestock. The house was built in 1770 – or thereabouts and had been updated last around 1800. He did extensive renovations before my grandmother would allow my mother to move in with the new baby.
The Institute Cookbook’s recipe for mincemeat “has remained unchanged for quite some time”. The book dates from 1800 and the editor is prone to understatement so I imagine a cook in my childhood home might have made it the same way in 1770. My father told me once that his grandmother made mincemeat with woodchuck, but he too was prone to understatement and I would keep to the “lean beef” mentioned in the recipe, myself.
1 lb suet, 2 lbs lean beef, 1 quart chopped apple
1/4 C candied orange peel and 1/4 C candied lemon peel, 1/2 lb citron, 3 C seeded raisins and 1 C currants
Juice and grated rind of 1 lemon and one orange
1/2 C molasses, 1 C sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp allspice and cloves, 1 nutmeg, grated (about 1 tsp)
2 1/2 C sweet cider (as opposed to hard cider)
Let the meat simmer slowly in a covered kettle until tender (insert my father’s story about sampling the meat cooking on the back of the stove, finding it fairly lean and good, and then being told it was ‘chuck). Run the meat and then the suet through a meat chopper and mix well. Add the other ingredients, chopping the peels and citron before adding. Put in a stone (ceramic) crock and let stand several days to ripen. Bake in a plain or half puff paste double crust pie.
I should add that I’ve had vegetarian versions made with beets and dried apples instead of meat and suet – not the same, but not bad.
In drear-nighted December
Saturday, December 26th, 2009Yesterday we had a wonderful Christmas. There were friends and family, decorated cookies, stollen and panettonne, casseroles and decorations and a Bueche de Noel – all the best from every culture we could filch from and some that we made up. There’s another side of Christmas, though, as there is to every day we set aside to gather with family and friends. To properly celebrate the holiday with those we did not see or will not see again, we need some Keats.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would ’twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.”
- John Keats
Our Hardy Ancestors, documented
Friday, December 11th, 2009
Winter is truly here and there is no gardening at 21 degrees F and 30 knots unless you count going through the seed catalogs. (Here’s where I man up and admit that I’ve already placed my seed orders for summer 2010, so that exercise would be redundant.) At 19:30 EST in July I’d still be working outdoors in broad daylight, but it is late November at 44 Lat and the sun went down hours ago. Winter is the time for research, and I have plenty of indoor projects that need work.
As part of my genealogy project I’ve been going through boxes and scrapbooks to find illustrations of the characters I’m researching. Or at least that’s how the process is supposed to go; I’ve reached Dorothy Filley Bidwell’s part in the family tree and it’s time to find a picture. But sometimes my hand stutters over a snapshot that’s just too good to put back in the box, never mind that I haven’t quite got to that branch of the tree.
This is, right to left, Minnie Cornelia Smith and her husband Walter Alexander Sheldon, and Emma Estelle Smith and her husband George Elisha Lyman. The Smith sisters had a double wedding on October 1, 1895 and this picture was taken on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. Bet that was a heckava party.
Our Hardy Ancestors, continued
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009Generally these OHA posts are all about food and the way people cooked the dickens out of it around the turn of the last century, or possibly the one before that. But in the olden days they did more than overcook seafood. When the sun went down and chores were done, my maternal grandfather researched genealogy at his rolltop desk. My mother remembers him calling long lost relatives in New York state, noting marriage lines and cross referencing maiden names. His four children could recite the Barnard line back seven generations: Raymond, Louis, Judah Harrison, Judah Pinney, Ebenezer, Francis and Joseph.
All his work on the family line is gone now, lost with the rolltop desk. A few years ago I inherited a family bible (or three) and tried to begin again. After a few weeks the piece of vellum I had taped to the wall had grown to 5′ x 6′, with extra pieces flapping all over with the names of children I’d forgotten and second marriages. I had to take it down when winter really set in and we started up the wood stove so as not to end the family line in a house fire.
Two years later I tried my first software genealogy program. It sucked – I think that’s actually the technical term. Family Tree Maker 1.0 was deeply flawed, structurally unsound and compulsively tidy. No one ever remarried, had step children or came into the line undocumented. In my family it’s not unusual to have one set of siblings marry another set, and then the remaining two marry after their spouses have passed on. This kind of behaviour is hard on probate courts and software, and don’t even get me started on gender issues. FTM 1.0 hated my family so much it eventually stopped working altogether.
Two weeks ago I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker 2010, because winter is setting in and I knew what would happen if I started taping big sheets of vellum to the wall behind the wood stove. I never thought I’d be plugging software on this blog, but this product is more fun than a video game. Well, any video game that’s not GTA IV.
My favorite of the Barnards has always been Francis. Referred to as “Deacon” Francis in the lore, he married Lucretia Pinney in 1740 when she was 19 and he was 21. Starting in 1743 they had 13 children: Lucretia, Lydia, Irana, Aaron, Moses, David, Sara, Elizabeth, Elijah, Ebenezer, Samuel, Elihu, Caroline and Francis, Jr. They lived in the same town I grew up in, and my mother often told me of the sign on the side of the house that proclaimed:
The house stood on Duncaster Rd. until 1989. I have a vivid memory of the sign, but now I can’t remember if I saw it myself or simply heard the story often enough to make it real. In ‘89 they took the house down and the Wintonbury Historical Society put up a plaque in honor of the sons. Tonight I’m going to fire up the program and record the daughters, too.
Plum Duff
Friday, November 27th, 2009
Normally I wouldn’t start a post off with a picture, but “Plum Duff” isn’t really going to tell you much all by itself. And the Wikipedia article will re-direct to “Spotted Dick” and then you’re REALLY going to need a picture. It’s a dessert, people. A lovely, delicious, traditional dessert created by people for whom the term “Spotted Dick” was a fond endearment.
For this recipe you’ll need a few specialty items. I always hate running across that in a recipe I perhaps haven’t read closely before starting out; “You’ll need a flugelhorn!”, announces the author, brightly. “These days you can find one easily on Amazon!”. So, advance warning, for this recipe you will need a pudding mold or basin with a lid or cover, a metal trivet to rest the mold on the bottom of a pot, either tall enough to enclose it, or close enough that a collar of aluminum foil will do the trick.
My Great Aunt Margaret’s Plum Duff
* This used to be a very messy process – cutting the prunes with a sharp pair of sewing scissors, cooking and then mashing the results. Now we can throw the cooked, drained fruit in the cuisinart and have done with it.
Now mix in the prunes, add the flour. . .
And spoon the whole mess into the greased pudding mold. Now would be a good time to mention that the pudding is going to be a solid mass in the bottom of this mold after you’ve cooked it and allowed it to cool. It will look like it is solidly glued in there, but no – set the pan in very hot water for a few minutes and then invert over a plate. It should fall right out – if not feel free to repeat the process. It’s not like this stuff is fragile.
To the left in this photo is my aluminum trivet, useful for keeping the mold off the bottom of the pot. It is stamped “1820 Cincinnati” on the bottom, so hey – an antique! I expect modern trivets would work just as well. Also, please ignore the Goya Black Bean Soup can. I’m not making anything from this product placement – the can was there for our supper of huevos rancheros later on that night.
I didn’t think I had a photo of the pot with its aluminum collar, but here it is. Evidently I’d thought I’d blog my recipe for huevos rancheros, because there’s all the fixin’s, but thought the better of it. Everybody already has a favorite recipe for those. But waaayyy in the back there you can see how to make your stew pot a steamer for your pudding mold.
Steam the pudding at a low to moderate temperature for about an hour. You shouldn’t be able to hear it boiling madly, and check about half way through to see that the water level still comes close to 3/4 of the way up the mold.Add more hot (from the tap) water if you’re getting low. The temperature may drop below simmer for a minute but it’s not going to bother your Duff.
Cool the pudding in the mold overnight in a cool place, then unmold it and decorate for the season. I used horehound, lavender and geranium because this is Thanksgiving and you can never tell when someone is going to eat the garnish – better to make it all edible.
Now go check out all the interesting steamed dishes out there, like The Bitten Word’s Persimmon Cake (which they did w/o a pudding mold).
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
- 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 2 cups cooked prunes
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 tablespoons cold milk
- Beat eggs well.
- Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.
- Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.
- Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
- Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.
- Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped crea
2 large eggs
1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups cooked prunes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons cold milk
1. Beat eggs well.
2. Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.
3. Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.
4. Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
5. Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.
6. Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped cream.
- m.
Social Capital – the business model
Monday, November 23rd, 2009I was down in the village last Saturday, doing errands and enjoying the relative peace and quiet now that most of the folks from away are well, away. It occurred to me that two of my favorite businesses in town are right next to each other, on a cul-de-sac off Cottage Street.
Cadillac Avenue is a short, narrow, heavily rutted dead end that opens up into a dirt lot facing the backs of other buildings on three sides. Not a promising piece of real estate, but very expensive nonetheless, just by being located in down town Bar Harbor. To one side of the dirt lot sits The Bagel Factory, where Agnes S. makes bagels. Agnes makes the best bagels in the world, but she does not tolerate stupidity, arrogance, sloth or bad manners. You may be able to get a bagel – or a salmon and mozzarella pizza, or a tempeh and goat cheese sandwich with ripe pears – or you may get kicked to the curb. Agnes is one of the finest human beings you will ever have a chance to meet – don’t screw up.
Just to the left of The Bagel Factory is Ahlblad’s Picture Framing or, as the sign says, “hlblad’s”. Nobody cares about the sign. All of Raymond Strout’s customers find their way by word of mouth and are willing to wait unspecified amounts of time for a frame and treatment of Raymond’s choosing. Martha Stewart deals with Raymond when she’s in town and so do countless collectors of old maps, antique prints and fragile photographs. His skill with molding is matched by his taste, and his memory for every piece of visual art and every customer that has ever passed through his door is perfect – an infinitely accommodating human database of art. Which must help him find what he needs amid the epic clutter of his shop.
But no one finds Raymond or Agnes through their web presence – they don’t have any. These stores barely have phone numbers, only appear on Google maps if you already know how to spell “(A)hlblad”, and are only open on the kind of schedule that needs to be memorized after long familiarity. You have to know someone who knows someone – someone on a budget who used to live in Paris and has a thing for reading Antonin Artaud over a bagel and a cup of hot cider, and therefore knows Agnes. Even then, you might arrive and find that the bagels are sold out and Raymond isn’t answering the bell. If you know a place like this, you’ll just shake your head and vow to come earlier next time.