Louis Harrison Barnard’s Japanese Tea Set, with cosmos and calendula blossoms.
Posts Tagged ‘rememberance’
New work
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Somebody’s Grandma’s Banana Bread
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Occasionally I forget to look around the house before I find myself in the grocery store on lunch hour, wondering if we have bananas. And then we end up with too many bananas.
This is a terrific recipe for banana bread, but it’s not my grandmother’s. For one thing, no one in my family is “Grandma”. Women who’s children have children are addressed by their name, say “Martha”, or by their title and surname, as in “Grandma Burnham”. That goes double for recipe cards. The card for this recipe is so stained and creased that I’m not sure who wrote it but it doesn’t matter. This is the fix for when you’ve been to the store without a list. Again.
Grandma’s Banana Bread/Cake
Preheat oven to 350 and grease and flour a 9″ tube pan.
Toast 1/2 C walnuts or pecans in a frying pan until “sweating” and fragrant. Process them in the food processor until chopped fairly small. Don’t clean the bowl. Empty the nuts into a bowl and mix with 1 Tbs of the flour and spice mixture below. Sometimes I add 1/2 C raisins to the mix. Set aside. This recipe calls for 1 C mashed bananas. I regularly throw 3 into the cuisinart and process until smooth. I think you get more banana taste that way. Set aside.
Combine in a small bowl: 2 C flour (can be partially whole wheat), 2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp allspice (optional, but I like it).
In a large bowl cream 1/2 C shortening (I use melted butter, but anything goes here), 1 C sugar. Add two eggs and 1 tsp vanilla and beat well. Use neighbor-lady eggs if you can get them.
Add the flour mixture, then the bananas, then the nuts and stir everything together. Dump it into the tube pan and spread evenly. Bake for 45 minutes, or until the bread is quite browned on top and firm to the touch.
I’ve frosted this bread with orange cream cheese frosting (which is delicious), but more often I serve it with butter and jam for tea.
I had a friend, years ago, who couldn’t stomach the tiny pieces of flour that occasionally stick to the walnuts and raisins in this cake. I found him picking them out at the dinner table one night, and thereafter mixed the nuts with cocoa so it didn’t show. I have no idea how wide-spread that affliction may be, so use that information if you have to, down the line.
Our 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.
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.
Our Hardy Ancestors, cont.
Friday, November 13th, 2009
Four generations go fishing. It sounds like the product of a random sentence generator.
Why do I have a dozen pictures of us fishing? We probably went all of twice – to a beautiful resevoir where Frank and Wat often fished under the bright Colorado sky. We baited hooks with orange roe that glowed like jewelry and got my fingers all sticky. After a long day we took home a damp canvas bag of small brown trout.
If you actually catch a fish you will need to read pages 56 through 58 of the Institute Cookbook, where an extremely thorough description of cleaning, drawing, scaling and disemboweling your fish may be had, so there is no need of us repeating that here. Seriously, this is the only cookbook in my collection that uses the word “putrification” four times in one paragraph. And I had to look up “ptomaines” at Wikipedia. Now we will ignore your gutted fish, resting on it’s plank of ice in the cellar (to avoid tainting the butter in the icebox), and have a nice recipe for deviled crab that requires “cracker dust” instead. Remember, as you read this, that the crabs being fried for 10 minutes at the end of this recipe have been boiled for half an hour at the beginning and then cooked “over a hot fire” for a little while longer.
6 crabs, 1 hard-boiled egg, 4 Tbs butter, ground nutmeg, 1/2 C heavy cream, salt and cayenne, 1/4 tsp sweet marjoram, cracker dust
Put the crabs into hot water, add salt and boil for thirty minutes. Cut the meat into small pieces, add the hard-boiled egg, cream, butter and seasoning and cook for a few minutes over a hot fire, thickening the mixture with cracker dust. Fill the shells, dip them in the raw egg, beaten, then in cracker dust; place in a hot oven or drop into boiling fat and fry until deep brown.
Don’t try this at home.
Our Hardy Ancestors, Part III
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
OHA is a series of posts about how my family ate and behaved around the turn of the last century. They (mostly) survived to great age, and I expect some would have past the 120 year mark if any of them had eaten vegetables. Herewith a “skeleton menu”, copied out by my great, great grandmother and pasted into the cover of The Institute Cookbook for her reference.
A Full Course Dinner
Shellfish – on ice with lemon – light oyster crackers, then Clear Soup – in soup plates, half full – thick slices of bread or roll folded in the napkin. Followed by Hors D’Oeurvres – olives, celery, radishes, etc. to be passed after soup is served, then Fish – with appropriate sauce, potato balls and cucumbers if possible. Then the Entree – patties, timable of chicken, or creamed dishes in paper cases (bread passed), then Meat – with appropriate sauce, jelly, potatoes, one vegetable and fruit punch. Then Game – small birds, whole; other in halves or slices with varying accompaniments then Salad – served with the game – Brie, Roquefort orcream cheese and crackers. Then Hot Pudding with lemon sauce; Glace – ice, ice cream or frozen dessert – with sweet wafers, followed by Dessert – nts, fruits, bonbons, crackers, cheese and finally Coffee – black, served with sugar alone.
The painting is “Jacob’s Birthday”, from 2006. And to think, we only had three courses.
Bon apetite!
Time is but the stream I go fishing in,
Sunday, October 11th, 2009I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains. Henry David Thoreau.
My mother moved from a 21 room farmhouse to a four room apartment in 1985. It was in her mother’s house, and she was happy enough to leave her historic, but drafty, house behind but it did mean there was a table, chair, shelf and footstool crammed into every corner. There were corner shelves with little shelves on top of them and piles of candlesticks and tablecloths on every horizontal surface. She managed to disperse some of the treasure and eventually moved to Florida, then to Connecticut and then to Maine. Her home now is a one-bedroom condo. There is no cellar, no attic, no roomy pantry for the thick-walled canning jars that now belong to me. Mine too are the ceramic jugs plugged with rolls of cork and ancient tool-steel knives with antler handles, but surprisingly few table linens. Maybe she thought I had too many of those of my own.
Yesterday she gifted me with two antique fabric bags, made by her father’s stepmother, also Harriet, but with two “t”s. They are quite beautiful. One is a mourning bag, with an elegant polished cotton finish, very plain except for her initial. The other is a sewing bag with a covered needle case that still contains two steel and one bone needle.
A close-up of the morning bag, and the initial done in outline stitch and French knots. I can never make mine that regular. I took the picture on what my family calls “the red hutch”, between the fruit salver and the green milk-glass candlestick. No wonder I paint still life.
And here is a close up of the sewing pouch. The wool has been damaged by insects – it is very soft and fine and probably delicious, but the blanket stitch has held up well.
So my question is, where does she keep this stuff? Are there bags of weird and beautiful women’s-work hidden under the sink? Ancient poetry books under the sofa? (Actually I know there are some of those.) I can’t wait to visit again. Maybe that’s the point.
Apart.
Monday, September 7th, 2009
It is your face that I keep within my heart, the sound of your voice that I keep within my mind, the days of your youth that rise in my dreams, give shape and color to my words, my sentences.
Whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter.
C. P. Cavafy