Generally 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.
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.
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.
I don’t really have a recipe for parsley butter – it’s more of a kitchen staple. Try this on a bowl of hot pasta, in an omelet, or as we did yesterday, on tea sandwiches.
They also mitigate our harsh climate, parceling out the change from 10 degrees to 40 over the course of a January afternoon into smaller, gentler increments.
Some of the rocks are spectacular specimens all on their own. . .
. . . and some are simply a sturdy, not unattractive place to put your foot while weeding.
I found this beautiful pale upright while digging a carrot bed. It has taken a few years of wind and weather to expose its true colors.
Heath and heather require top-notch drainage. In this climate it’s not even the cold that kills these plants, it is wet roots and layers of clay. I dig a fairly deep hole (2′ for a 4″ pot) and fill it with large rocks and sand before planting a member of this family in a peaty hollow at the surface. My oldest plants have survived 15 winters here and thrived.
This rock isn’t really visible in the summer, hedged in by daylilies and Bouncing Bet. In this season it’s sculpture.
One of the great joys of autumn up North is the apple harvest. The “King of the Orchard” is a staple crop here, and the only orchard fruit to bear regularly and abundantly despite spring freezes and cold summer rain. Yesterday my friend Liz and I went to an abandoned homestead on the Douglas Highway on our lunch hour and picked grocery bags of apples: Baldwin, Yellow Transparent, Olive Crab, Winter Greening and a few others that I can’t identify even using “
Wash your apples if you need to. None of these have been sprayed, and they grow at least a quarter mile from any road so a light rinse will do. Halve them and cut out the stem and blossom ends. I halve them only to check for rot or insect damage.
The apples are ready when they’ve “exploded”. Turn off the heat and allow the juices to soak in for about half an hour with the pot still covered.
Dump the apple mixture into your food mill in batches. It would be nice to wait long enough for the apples to cool to room temperature, but by this time it’s always 10:30 p.m. and I have to get on with it. By all means wait till you can comfortably handle the fruit if you have that luxury – it won’t do it any harm and you’ll avoid spatter burns. Crank the mixture through the mill. The Villaware produces a nice smooth sauce, ruddy and thick with the processed apple skins, and only about a cup of waste from a whole pot of apples.
According to Liz, this is pretty good stuff.