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Emma DuPuy Reed’s Pickled Peaches

Friday, September 3rd, 2010
This photo and others come courtesy of Sue Haas.
 
Canning season is in full force—and as usual I am thinking about putting food up more than I’m doing it.
 
Thanks to Sue Haas of Seattle, however, I have made my first ever batch of pickled peaches. This lovely old fashioned recipe comes from Sue’s grandmother, Emma DuPuy Reed.
 
Miss Emma was born in 1871 and died in 1962 and was, according to Sue, “quite a lady.” Sue is working on a young-adult novel about her grandmother’s life. In the meantime, here are a few recollections she shared with me.
 
Emma Louisa DuPuy was born and grew up in a French Huguenot family in Philadelphia. Her father, Charles Meredith DuPuy, an engineer and inventor, was one of the founding members of the Huguenot Society of America. He also wrote a book about the DuPuy Family. She and her sisters were neighbors of and friends with Cecilia Beaux, the American Impressionist portrait painter, in West Philly. There are several portraits of DuPuy family members painted by C. Beaux. One is now at the Williams College Museum of Art…. 

Emma was a tall, dignified, beautiful lady with big blue eyes, a generous smile, and a wonderful sense of humor. She married William Ebenezer Reed, an engineer (from Manchester, VT), in 1902. Emma lived in a rent-controlled high-ceilinged, elegant apartment in Manhattan for over 50 years. Emma and “Eben” raised their five children there and Grandma gave birth to all of them at home. They had a maid and a cook and kept the traditions of Victorian table settings. I still remember dipping my fingers in thin, glass finger bowls placed on lace doilies–possibly necessary after eating sticky pickled peaches! 

      Emma DuPuy in 1901, a year before her marriage 
 
Emma loved peaches. Peach ice cream was her favorite. She made her pickled peaches in Blue Point, L. I., where she also made raspberry jelly. I remember catching soft-shelled crabs in Blue Point, too, and occasionally seeing them escape from their bucket and scramble around on the kitchen floor before being plopped into boiling water.
 
I remember, as a child, helping my mother, Mary, make pickled peaches…mostly I remember peeling them after they’d been dipped in boiling water. Sometimes my fingers would turn purple and I remember my mother telling me to use lemon juice to get rid of the stains. (I didn’t notice that happening when I made the pickled peaches this summer, though.)
 
This summer my own daughter, Alysa, wanted me to teach her how to can. So we canned raspberry jam. She was busy on the day I canned the pickled peaches but I’m passing the recipe on to her.
 
I remember, as a child, eating juicy, cinnamon-y pickled peaches with roast turkey on Thanksgiving at Grandma’s Manhattan apartment many years ago. And I can’t wait to serve them to my own grandchildren at our Thanksgiving table this year in Seattle.
 
Sue’s recollections of her grandmother struck me as perfect for a project called In Our Grandmothers’ Kitchens. So did this recipe. I did get pretty sticky handling the peaches, but what sweet stickiness! I can hardly wait to eat them with a festive meal.
 
Sue suggests serving them with roast pork or ham as well as turkey. You may either take the cloves out of the peaches yourself before serving or let your guests remove their own. 

Now, if I only had a rent-controlled apartment in New York City………..

 
 
Ingredients:
 
8 pounds fresh peaches (about 16 medium peaches)
4 pounds sugar (about 9 cups)
1 pint white vinegar
whole cloves (6 per peach = 96 cloves)
4 sticks cinnamon
 
Equipment:
 
large canning pot with rack
large cooking pot for heating water to peel peaches
large cooking pot for syrup and peaches
cheesecloth (cut a piece about 8 x 12 inches)
string
teaspoon
4 to 5 sterilized pint canning jars, new lids, and screwbands (sterilize in dishwasher or in boiling water in large canning pot with rack)
 
Instructions:
 
Preparation of canning pot:
 
Fill large canning pot with enough water to cover the two quart-size canning jars. Bring water to boil and keep hot.
 
Peeling peaches in hot water & adding cloves:
 
Boil about 2 quarts of water in a big cooking pot. Remove from heat. Place peaches in hot water for about 1 minute, or long enough so that skins may be peeled off easily. Remove peaches from water and cool in colander. Peel peaches and discard peels. You may cut peaches into halves or leave them whole. I cut them in half, but it’s tricky to keep them intact. Whole peaches are easier. Insert 3 cloves into each peeled peach half. Set aside.
 
Cinnamon spice packet:
 
Make a spice packet with 4 sticks of cinnamon wrapped in a piece of cheesecloth. Tie a string to close the bag. Leave one end of string long enough to reach over the side of the pot to pull out when syrup has thickened. You may tie the long end of the string to a teaspoon to weigh it down so it won’t slip back into the pot.
 
Note from Tinky: I just made a little knot in the cheesecloth and removed the cinnamon with a slotted spoon later. I couldn’t find my string!
 
Syrup: 

Mix sugar and vinegar in a large cooking pot. Add the cinnamon packet to the pot. Heat on stove to boiling. Turn down and let simmer about 30 minutes until syrup turns golden and thickens.

 

Cooking the Peaches

 
Cook peaches in syrup:
 
Place peaches in the syrup and cook about 10 minutes on medium heat until soft. You may have to add the peaches in batches, depending on the size of the pot. When the peaches have finished cooking remove the cinnamon packet from the liquid. (You may save the cinnamon sticks and place one in each jar of pickled peaches if you like.)
 
Canning peaches:
 
Place peaches in the jars and pour syrup to about half an inch from the top of each jar. Seal with new canning lids and screw on screwbands. Place sealed jars on rack in hot water bath in large canning pot, making sure tops of jars are covered with water. Boil gently for about 10 minutes. Bubbles of air will come out of the jars.
 
Remove jars from water bath and let sit on a tray without moving them for about 24 hours. You’ll know jars are sealed if you hear the lids pop, and they are flat (not convex) when you press the tops with your finger. 

Makes 4 to 5 pints. You will have quite a bit of leftover syrup. You may use it to can more peaches, serve it as an appetizer over cream cheese, or make a cocktail with it. (Tinky here: I’m thinking maybe something with rum?)

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Posted in Canning and Preserving, Historical Figures, Peaches | 5 Comments »

For the Love of Film: Reflections on Iris Barry

Thursday, February 18th, 2010
(Courtesy of A Clock Without Hands)

Iris Barry (Courtesy of A Clock Without Hands)

 
Long ago and far away, I wrote a not very fascinating master’s thesis about a person who was very fascinating indeed.
 
Iris Barry (1895-1969) was one of film preservation’s heroines. This chic Britisher was an influential film critic in London in the 1920s, writing for three separate periodicals—the popular Daily Mail, the literary Spectator, and the fashionable Vogue.
 
A founder of the London Film Society, she was one of the first people in Britain—indeed, in the world—to call for films to be preserved.
 
Barry moved to New York in 1930 and cultivated friendships with a number of people in the city’s artistic and philanthropic circles. In 1932 her contacts paid off; she was asked to establish a library at the Museum of Modern Art.
 
In 1935 the museum started a film library—and Barry became its first curator. Her charge, according to Time magazine, was to “preserve for students and posterity important moving pictures of the past.”
 
For the next 15 years she helped invent and establish the whole idea of saving and curating films.
 
I recently asked Haidee Wasson of Concordia University, author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (2005), about Barry’s accomplishments at the museum. Wasson replied in part:
 
Barry wrote in her autobiographical notes that the accomplishment of which she was most proud was that after her work at MoMA, she believed that “films would be dated like fine wine.” Before her, this was not a convention of film culture.
 
I hadn’t thought about Barry for years until a few days ago, when I read about a wonderful idea and cause. This week Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren are organizing a blogathon called For the Love of Film to highlight the ongoing task of film preservation and to raise funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation.
 
I decided at once to participate—and to resurrect my research on Iris Barry. My thesis dealt with her early work, particularly her writings for the Daily Mail between 1925 and 1930.
 
Unfortunately, my notes (if they still exist) are in another state, and I haven’t had a chance to get there to look for them since I heard about the blogathon.
 
So I’m sharing with you a few of my memories of Iris Barry—old, secondhand memories, but vivid ones nonetheless.
 
For the love
 
Barry was conscious from the very first of her role as a promoter and defender of film. Her 1926 book Let’s Go to the Pictures (titled Let’s Go to the Movies here in the States), like her criticism, embodied the different personae she adopted in relation to film.
 
Barry was conscious of her membership in London’s artistic and literary circles. A protégé of Ezra Pound, she had written poetry and fiction before finding an occupation in film criticism. She wanted to establish film as an art form and to define the sort of art form it might be.
 
She also saw herself as an unabashed film fan—a lover of the experience of going to the movies as well as of individual films and stars.
 
It was in part this schizophrenic nature of Barry’s film criticism that drew me to her. She could heap praise on Felix the Cat (whom she called “an institution, a totem”) as well as D.W. Griffith’s masterwork Intolerance.
 
I believe that most of us who have written about film and its history share this duality. We want to study and preserve films because they can be rich examples of cultural history or magnificent works of art.
 
We also want to study and preserve them because we grew up getting a thrill from westerns or thrillers or screwball comedies, from Clint Eastwood or Ginger Rogers or Anne Hathaway. Like Iris Barry, we are all fans of the flickers.
 
One of Barry’s other appealing characteristics as a critic was her insistence that “[t]he Cinema exists to please women.” She maintained that the majority of filmgoers in Britain were women and that filmmakers programmed for them.
 
She also urged her fellow female film watchers to be discriminating, to ask for more than sweet love stories in their film fare. “The cinema provides us with the safe dreams we want,” she wrote, “and if our dreams are often not worth having, it is because we demand no better.”
 
Marcine of the blog A Clock Without Hands wrote a post last summer citing Barry’s accomplishments and concluding, “Is it even necessary for me to say that [Barry] has lived my dream life?”
 
I also applaud Iris Barry’s accomplishments. Her life was not always a dream, however. In a recent email Jillian Slonim of New York, who is working on a biography of Barry, described her as ”a person whose public activities were known and acknowledged but whose private life was both complicated and kept under wraps by her.”
  
I look forward to reading Jill’s work as I indeed know little about Barry’s life. Jill says, “[T]he more I delve into Barry the more interesting she becomes to me.”
 
I do know this: Iris Barry was often poor. She arrived in New York at the onset of the Depression with a great wardrobe but not much else. I admire her courage in striking out on her own this way, but the experience doesn’t sound pleasant.
 
Her close relationships were stormy. She seems to have been drawn to men who abused or neglected her. The most significant example of this phenomenon (and probably the most significant man in her life) was the poet and artist Wyndham Lewis, with whom Barry lived from 1918 to 1921.
 
 
Wyndham Lewis, "L'Ingenue" (1919, a portrait of Barry), Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Wyndham Lewis, "L'Ingenue" (1919, a portrait of Barry), Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

 
Lewis was a stereotypical Bohemian artist of his period—temperamental, unfaithful, and occasionally just plain mean. He and Barry had two children, both of whom were farmed off to others to raise.
 
Barry married twice—once in London to a poet named Alan Porter; the second time in New York to John Abbott, a financier who was an administrator at the Museum of Modern Art and technically supervised her, although it seems clear that she was the one in charge of the Film Library. Neither marriage lasted.
 
In the late 1940s at the Cannes Film Festival she met Pierre Kerroux, a Frenchman who was apparently working as a smuggler at the time. She lived with him in Fayence at the end of her life. At least one friend of hers I interviewed at the time of my master’s thesis was concerned that Kerroux abused her physically. 
 
The two had few resources on which to draw. Barry’s occasional work for the museum could not have supplied much income. And she clearly had a drinking problem by the end of her life if not before.
 
Barry may have been thinking of her own relationships with men when she wrote in her Portrait of Lady Mary Montagu (1928):

Love she really knew very little about. That is the misfortune of women, that they have an appetite but no natural genius for it…. It is simple enough for a man to be attracted by a woman; but so very hard for him to accept her as a human being.
  
In my correspondence with Haidee Wasson I asked what attracted her to Barry. Here is part of her reply:
 
I was drawn to Iris Barry partly because she was such a pivotal figure for the history of film, and its relationship to art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The more I learned about her the more compelling I found her to be. She was dynamic and uncommonly intelligent.…
 
And, I long have had the sense that she didn’t suffer fools. Barry also managed to balance the compromises required of working within established institutions yet also mining a deeply personal passion. I don’t think she was always the most likable person in the room. But, she was bold, proud and uncompromising.
 
I don’t wish for Iris Barry’s life—the poverty, the difficult relationships, the willingness to strike out blindly on new courses without thinking them through. Nevertheless, I do envy her passion: for film, for art, for preserving beauty and culture.
 
I celebrate her achievements as a critic and a curator. And I admire her poetic soul.
 
In a 1931 Bookman article about London’s literary and artistic milieu during World War I Barry wrote:
 
The effect, all too little realized at the time, was as though something that mattered very much had somehow and rather miraculously been preserved round that table when so much else was being scattered, smashed up, killed, imprisoned or forgotten….
 
It was, for the hours the gathering lasted, less important that so many were being killed and more that something lived: possible to recall that for every Blenheim there is a Voltaire and that the things that endure are not stupidity or fear.
 
Iris Barry herself accomplished “something that mattered.” And she was someone who mattered.
 
Happily, Barry is beginning to achieve the recognition she deserves. Haidee Wasson and Leslie Hankins have both published journal articles examining her writings. Jillian Slonim is finding everyone she can (and every piece of paper she can) to shed light on Barry’s life and work.
 
Jill reports that MoMA is planning to launch a “Modern Women” exhibition in Spring 2010 that will include some of Barry’s original programming.
 
More intimately, perhaps, with Jill Slonim’s help the town of Fayence, France, held a “Jour Iris Barry” last fall. On this day Fayence celebrated its late resident and officially named the movie theater in the town’s new cultural center after her.
 
love2
 
If like Iris Barry YOU have a passion for film, please consider donating to the National Film Preservation Foundation. The NFPF is giving away four DVD sets to donors chosen in a random drawing this week.
 
And of course please do visit some of the other bloggers who are writing this week For the Love of Film.
 
Meanwhile, here is a (vaguely) Iris-inspired recipe.
 
I have to admit that none of my old research on Barry gave me a clue about what to cook. Unfortunately for me but not for her, Jillian Slonim is currently at the Berlin Film Festival. She wrote:
 
Iris did like to eat though she went through many periods in which she could not afford to eat well or what she might have wanted to eat. I seem to remember reading something she wrote in her later years–when she lived in Fayence–about liking asparagus but won’t be able to check that until I’m back home…too late for the blogathon.
 
I turned to Haidee Wasson, who told me of Barry’s “tea habit.” Apparently, she enjoyed afternoon tea, particularly in her London days. So I brewed a pot of tea and made some smoked-salmon tea sandwiches. I’m sure that when Barry was doing well financially she enjoyed them. I hope you enjoy them, too.
 
And I promise my next post will be MUCH, MUCH shorter than this one…….
 
salmsandeb
 
Film (and Fish) Lovers’ Tea Sandwiches
 
I started to write down exact proportions for these little treats, but I gave up on that idea rather quickly because like most tea sandwiches they are best assembled to taste. I just stirred lemon zest, dill, and pepper into the cheese until it tasted delicious but not too strong.
 
If you want to vary the recipe, you may certainly add capers to the cheese and/or garnish. And if you’re like my mother (who adores butter), you may add a layer of butter underneath the cheese.
 
Ingredients:
 
thinly sliced white bread (either a solid homemade bread such as the one I used in my BOLT sandwiches or a commercial brand such as Pepperidge Farm)
whipped cream cheese or soft goat cheese, at room temperature
a handful of fresh dill, chopped but not too finely
grated lemon zest
freshly ground pepper
sliced smoked salmon, cut into small pieces
 
Instructions:
 
If you want to, cut your bread into pretty shapes. Since Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up, I used shamrocks. Cut off the crusts even if you don’t make shapes.
 
In a bowl thoroughly combine the cheese, most of the dill, most of the lemon zest, and the pepper.
 
Spread the cheese mixture generously onto the pieces of bread. Top with salmon and a bit more dill and lemon zest.
 
Brew up a pot of tea and watch an old film.
 
 
 
Iris Barry in France with artist Jean Raine (Courtesy of www.jeanraine.org)

Iris Barry in France with artist Jean Raine (Courtesy of www.jeanraine.org)

 

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Posted in Appetizers, Historical Figures, Sandwiches, TV and Film History | 14 Comments »

Lillian Hellman, Pot Roast, and Pentimento

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

cover

 
Playwright and author Lillian Hellman was the commencement speaker when I graduated from Mount Holyoke.
 
Of course, my class originally wanted Katharine Hepburn. All the senior classes in my era wanted Katharine Hepburn. The characters she portrayed onscreen epitomized what we wanted to be—smart, sleek, and strong minded; sophisticated yet caring.
 
(My friend Kelly, who programmed the films that showed weekly in the art museum auditorium, managed to stay within her budget because she showed at least one Hepburn picture every semester. They always sold out.)
 
Hepburn never accepted the annual invitations that winged their way to her from South Hadley, Massachusetts. Senior classes always had a backup. Hellman was ours.
 
I didn’t know a lot about Lillian Hellman at the time. I had read a play or two of hers (probably at least The Children’s Hour), and I had seen the movie Watch on the Rhine. I knew that she had been blacklisted by the film industry after refusing to name names in testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
 
Of course, I had also seen Carol Burnett’s infamous spoof of Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes, which is now better known than the Broadway version with Tallulah Bankhead or the Hollywood film with Bette Davis.
 
I was intrigued by the idea of Hellman as a commencement speaker.
 
I wish I could tell you exactly what she said to the graduating seniors that day. (If I were at another of my alma maters, the University of Texas, I could read a draft of the address in her papers at the Harry Ransom Center.)
 
As it is, I’ll have to rely on memory—which, as Hellman’s career illustrates, is not always the most accurate recorder of information.
 
Here’s what my 20-year-old brain retained: Lillian Hellman was just plain mean. There we seniors stood in our white dresses and black robes, saying goodbye to our friends and feeling a little nervous about going out into a world in which employment and security were uncertain.
 
I remember her castigating our generation for moral and intellectual laziness.
 
I was shocked and resentful. I wouldn’t have minded her trying to inspire this group of young women to be smarter and more socially committed.
 
Yelling at us because she didn’t think we (whom she didn’t know) had much resolve, however, just didn’t cut it as far as I was concerned.
 
For years now the only thing about Lillian Hellman I’ve liked has been her pot roast.
 
I found the pot roast recipe in Heartburn, the delightful 1983 novel by Nora Ephron that fictionalizes the breakup of Ephron’s marriage with journalist Carl Bernstein.
 
I made Nora’s version of Lillian’s pot roast last week and decided to revisit Lillian Hellman’s life and work a little before posting the recipe.
 
heartburncover
 
Today I won’t say I like Lillian Hellman, but I’m beginning to understand her.
 
I read her memoir An Unfinished Life in the hope that I’d find a more lovable (or at least more charming) side to her.
 
Her longtime intimate friend Dashiell Hammett said that he based the character of Nora Charles in The Thin Man on Hellman, or so Hellman claimed. It’s hard to reconcile the serious, self-centered writer of the memoir with the witty, glamorous, fun-loving Nora.
 
I also reread Pentimento, Hellman’s 1973 collection of essays that looked back on her impressions of people she had known in her youth. I first read the essays in a graduate seminar taught by Bill Stott, a skillful writer who wanted to help his students hone their own writing technique.
 
The title refers to an art-history term. “Pentimento” describes the way in which after many years oil paintings become transparent enough to reveal the painter’s first impulses (the ones that were painted over).
 
“That is all I mean about the people in this book,” wrote Hellman. “The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”
 
Hellman’s penchant for writing her life story was and is controversial. In 1980 novelist Mary McCarthy, a longtime rival of Hellman, appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and called Hellman “a bad writer and a dishonest writer.”
 
McCarthy infamously went on to say of Hellman, “[E]very word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
 
I could have warned McCarthy that Hellman was not a nice woman. She promptly sued McCarthy for defamation of character. The lawsuit wasn’t abandoned until Hellman died in 1984.
 
In the course of preparing her defense McCarthy uncovered a number of exaggerations and (yes) even lies in Hellman’s work.
 
Most controversially, McCarthy and others argued that the story “Julia” in Pentimento (which became a successful motion picture starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave) was untrue.
 
They argued that Hellman had never known the woman on whom the story was based but had appropriated the woman’s tale and woven herself into the narrative.
 
Ironically, it is Hellman’s dicey relationship with the truth in her nonfiction that has finally enabled me to identify with her. As a nonfiction writer myself I’m occasionally perplexed by the nature of truth.
 
In journalism school I was taught that one should be as accurate as possible, that although The Truth is an impossible standard to obtain it is something one should strive for.
 
Often, however, as I work on my writing (even on this blog) I wonder about the nature of truth and history. In a New York Times essay that asked both Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman to back away from the lawsuit Norman Mailer wrote:
 
No writer worthy of serious consideration is ever honest except in those rare moments—for which we keep writing—when we become, bless us, not dishonest for an instant. So of course Lillian Hellman is dishonest. So is Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, John Updike, John Cheever, Cynthia Ozick—name 500 of us, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Henry James—we are all dishonest, we exaggerate, we distort, we use our tricks, we invent.
 
I don’t entirely I agree with Mailer. I’m certainly not dishonest all or even most of the time. The way I present myself and my own memories on this blog is sometimes not strictly accurate, however.
 
Here’s how I like to present myself: I’m smart. I’m funny. I’m a good cook and a better singer. I live in a wonderful community surrounded by supportive friends and relatives whom I in turn support. I’m cute. I’m intuitive. I’m eternally youthful.
 
Of course, I am each of these things from time to time—but not often all at the same time. I share few of the recipes that fizzle, the photos in which I look really old and fat, the moments in which my family drives me crazy or I sing off key.
 
Nevertheless, I like to think that my occasionally exaggerated presentation of myself, of my own history, and of my recipes sometimes leads to greater truths than the sheer facts might convey.
 
I can begin, therefore, to understand Hellman’s conviction that her own memories were real and truthful even when they were contradicted by history books and other people’s memories.
 
I can even forgive her for not being Katharine Hepburn. Even Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t have been the Katharine Hepburn we Mount Holyoke girls idealized in our hearts and minds. (This is probably why she very wisely stayed away year after year.)
 
Although I still love Katharine Hepburn films, as I have matured I have begun to appreciate the archetypes embodied by other actresses of her era as well. I enjoy Joan Crawford’s ambitious working-glass heroines and Bette Davis’s often mean but always well motivated characters.
 
I suspect Hellman was more like Bette Davis than Nora Charles–a less fun but a more interesting persona.
 
And of course it would be hard to continue resenting anyone who invented this great pot roast, which serves a crowd and makes copious leftovers. Here, with apologies for my long windedness in today’s post, is the recipe.
 
lhprweb
 
Lillian Hellman’s Pot Roast
 
It is yet another tribute to the vagaries of memory and the intricacies of cooking that when I went back to the book Heartburn to look at the recipe I found that I haven’t made Lillian Hellman’s pot roast the way Nora Ephron describes it in years, if I ever did.
 
And of course who knows whether Ephron’s version was really Hellman’s. (I know, I know, this whole discussion is getting way too complicated—and POT ROAST IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE COMPLICATED.)
 
I’m going to give you Ephron’s basic recipe with my amendments. Neither her version nor mine is complicated, I promise. And they’re both tasty.
 
Ingredients:
 
1 4-pound piece of beef (“the more expensive the better” says Ephron)
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 envelope dried onion soup mix
1 large onion, chopped (I have been known to use 2)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cups red wine (plus!)
2 cups water (plus!)
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon dried thyme (or 2 teaspoons fresh)
1 teaspoon dried basil (or 2 teaspoons fresh)
(I also often add the following: 1 large can crushed tomatoes, 1 teaspoon dried and crushed chipotle peppers, 1 generous pound carrots, 7 to 8 cut up potatoes, and a handful of chopped parsley)
 
Instructions:
 
Ephron tells you to put her basic ingredients in a large “good” pot and bake them at 350 until the meat is tender, “3-1/2 hours or so.”
 
I tend to put them in a large Dutch oven on the stove top, add the tomatoes and chipotle plus a little more wine and water so that the pot roast is almost covered, and simmer them all day over low heat. I ALMOST cover the pot.
 
In the last couple of hours I add the carrots and potatoes. I add half of the parsley before the last half hour of cooking and use the rest as a garnish.
 
Serves 8. This is even better made one day and reheated the next.
 
 
The Accurate But Not Full Truth: I am not this adorable all the time. But once in a while......

The Accurate But Not Full Truth: I am not this adorable all the time. But once in a while......

 

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Posted in Comfort Food, Historical Figures, Meat and Poultry | 8 Comments »

What Fannie Farmer Means to Me

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Fannie Farmer around 1900 (Courtesy of the Boston Public Library)

Fannie Farmer around 1900 (Courtesy of the Boston Public Library)

 
Like many American home cooks I own more cookbooks than I can use. Over the years hand-me-downs from family members, birthday gifts, and impulse purchases have brought more than 100 volumes to my kitchen shelves.
 
Whenever I decide to try preparing a dish I’ve heard about but never made, I rummage through those shelves energetically, comparing versions in various culinary tomes and searching for the recipe that appeals to me most.
 
Nine times out of ten at the end of this ritual quest I end up holding the same book in my hands: The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
 
This basic cookbook, the use of which I inherited from my mother and her mother, celebrated its 114th birthday a few days ago.
 
The original 1896 edition was the product of the original Fannie Farmer, a zealous but engaging businesswoman.
 
Fannie Merritt Farmer was born in Boston in 1857, one of four daughters of a printer and his conscientious homemaker wife. The Farmers were not wealthy, but they did place a high value on education.
 
Redheaded Fannie, the brightest of the lot, was originally destined for college. Her education was derailed when as a high-school student she became ill with what scholars believe was probably polio. It took her years to learn to walk again.
 
She would not find her true calling until she reached 31, when her family and the woman for whom she had been working as a mother’s helper encouraged her to enroll in the Boston Cooking School.
 
The school, which specialized in training teachers and cooks, was part of a late-19th-century movement toward scientific cookery.
 
Farmer succeeded so well in her studies that at her graduation she was asked to serve as assistant to the school’s director, Carrie M. Dearborn. When Dearborn died a couple of years later Farmer was viewed as the obvious choice to take over the school.
 
She increased its enrollment by broadening its appeal, recruiting as students young women training to be homemakers rather than cooks. In 1901 she split off from the Boston Cooking School to start her own highly successful culinary academy, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery.
 
Before that departure, however, in 1896, Farmer took charge of revising and expanding the school’s main textbook, The Boston Cooking School Cookbook. She approached the Boston publisher Little, Brown about putting out a trade edition, arguing that it would sell well to the general public.
 
(Courtesy of Michigan State University)

(Courtesy of Michigan State University)

 
With shortsightedness they must have rued long afterward, Little, Brown’s representatives refused to take on the project. They did allow themselves to be persuaded by the self-confident Fannie Farmer to serve as her printers and distributors for the book.
 
Farmer paid the costs of publication and consequently took home the lioness’s share of the profits when the book enjoyed the success she had anticipated. The 3000 copies of the original printing sold out quickly, and the book saw yearly reprintings and frequent revisions until Farmer’s death in 1915, when it was taken on by other authors and editors.
 
Now known simply as The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the book is in its 13th edition.
 
Three major factors accounted for Farmer’s popularity as a teacher and as a writer. First, she had faith in herself and in her profession. “Progress in civilization,” she wrote in the first chapter of her cookbook, “has been accompanied by progress in cookery.”
 
Second, she enjoyed her work and expected her students and readers to enjoy preparing and eating food as well.
 
Laura Shapiro, who devoted a chapter of her book Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century to Farmer’s accomplishments, explained, “While other cooks always insisted that their own preferences in food were simple and austere, Fannie Farmer liked to eat and didn’t mind saying so.”
 
Her enthusiasm for food—plain and fancy, sweet and savory—communicated itself to those around her.
 
Finally, in an era in which cooking was still to a great extent an inexact science, Farmer streamlined its practice. She was known as “The Mother of Level Measurements.”
 
Shapiro recounted what she acknowledged as the probably apocryphal tale of a Boston Cooking School student who was confronted with recipes calling for pinches of salt and pats of butter the size of an egg. The student supposedly asked Farmer how big those pinches and eggs were supposed to be.
 
Perhaps in response to this sort of query, Farmer applied herself to the task of defining and reinforcing exact measurements. “Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure the best results,” she asserted in a section of her book titled “How to Measure.”
 
“A cupful is measured level … A tablespoon is measured level. A teaspoon is measured level.”  
 
This 1899 advertisement illustrates Fannie Farmer's authority as a food expert.

This 1899 advertisement illustrates Fannie Farmer's authority as a food expert.

 
My maternal grandmother, Clara Engel Hallett, studied under Fannie Farmer. The adopted child of well to do Vermont farmers, my grandmother was sent by her foster parents to take a course at Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery around 1910 in order to prepare for the culinary obligations of marriage to my grandfather.
 
My grandmother is now dead, and I never had the sense to ask her while she lived exactly what she learned at Fannie Farmer’s school.
 
From my many years of observing her in the kitchen—and my perusal of Farmer’s first edition—I would guess that my grandmother learned to respect the basic food groups. Even when dining alone she never served dinner without a salad course and some kind of bread.
 
I also surmise that her sweet tooth was reinforced by her months at the school. She clearly agreed with Farmer’s dictum that “pastry cannot easily be excluded from the menu of the New Englander.”
 
She took pride in her food’s appearance as well as its taste and always wore a frilly apron when she dished up a meal. And she passed on her love of basic cookery to my mother, who passed it on to me.
 
As well as valuing its inherent usefulness, then, I cherish my Fannie Farmer Cookbook (actually cookbooks; I have four editions and hope to collect more) for the ways in which it connects me to other people. Something about this substantial volume of substantial foods brings my grandmother into the kitchen with me.
 
It also brings in my mother, who is a darn fine cook but who would be lost nevertheless without her 1965 edition of the cookbook.
 
It keeps me in conversation with my friend Pat Leuchtman, who favors the 1959 version. “I like it because it was my first cookbook—and because I never go away empty handed when I turn to it with a question,” she explains.
 
And of course it gives me the benefit of the wisdom of more than a century of experts on, and lovers of, cookery, from Fannie Farmer herself down to the current author, Marion Cunningham.
 
“Today, more than ever,” Cunningham wrote in the 1990 edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, “I sense a hankering for home cooking, for a personal connection to our food.”
 
To me Fannie Farmer helps provide that connection.
 
ffnowweb
 
Fannie Farmer’s Safe Soufflé-like Substance
 
This egg dish isn’t in the current edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, but it definitely appeared in the one with which I grew up. I think it was called American Cheese Fondue.
 
I have made it without the Creole seasoning (it wasn’t in the original recipe), but I like the little zing it adds to the recipe.
 
With or without extra zing the dish is what food writer and editor Judith Jones calls “nursery fare”: tasty comfort food that is easy to eat and digest. It uses ingredients that are almost always in the house, and it can be thrown together into a simple, satisfying supper very quickly.
 
It doesn’t puff up like a true soufflé–but it doesn’t deflate like one, either!
 
Ingredients:
 
1 cup scalded milk
1/4 cup soft bread crumbs (I usually just crumble up bread)
1 cup small pieces of store (Cheddar) cheese
1 tablespoon sweet butter
1 teaspoon Creole seasoning or 1/2 teaspoon salt
3 egg yolks, beaten until they are thick
3 egg whites, beaten until they are stiff
 
Directions:
 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 1-1/2 quart casserole dish.
 
In a saucepan combine the milk, bread crumbs, cheese, butter, and seasoning. Cook, stirring, over low heat until the cheese and butter have melted and the mixture is relatively smooth. Remove from the heat.
 
Stir in the egg yolks; then gently fold in the egg whites. Don’t worry if some egg white remains visible.
 
Pour the mixture into the prepared casserole dish. Bake until much of the top turns a warm brown; this should take between 20 and 30 minutes. Serves 2 to 4, depending on appetite.
 
souffleweb

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Huckleberry Friendship Bars

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

huckbars web

 
After I published my Huckleberry Friend post about Johnny Mercer the other day one of my readers expressed her disappointment that I hadn’t included a huckleberry recipe.
 
Amazingly, I had been so busy expressing myself as a chanteuse that the cook part of me had failed to make that connection!
 
So I’m rectifying the omission here. Many thanks to Cathy for the idea. I hope the students and teachers at Huckleberry Hill School like these bars.
 
Since I didn’t have huckleberries on hand I made the bars with the huckleberry’s close cousin, the blueberry.
 
If your berries aren’t very juicy, you may want to add a little liquid (see the Gathered Blessings comment below) and/or reduce the amout of cornstarch.
 
Ingredients:
 
3 generous cups huckleberries or blueberries (you may use frozen ones, but defrost them before cooking!)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons cornstarch, dissolved in 1/4 cup water
1-1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1-1/2 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) sweet butter
 
Instructions:
 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with aluminum foil, and grease the foil.
 
In a saucepan combine the berries, sugar, lemon juice, and vanilla. Add the cornstarch paste and cook over low heat , stirring constantly, until the sauce thickens. Set it aside to cool.
 
In a medium bowl mix the dry ingredients and cut the butter into the mixture. Pat 3/4 of this crumb mixture into a the prepared baking dish. Add the fruit mixture. Sprinkle the remaining crumbs on top. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.
 
Cool the bars thoroughly before removing the foil and slicing. Makes from 16 to 32 bars, depending on your slicing skills.
 
Johnny Mercer looks for a good huckleberry recipe here (Savannah Morning News).

Johnny Mercer looks for a good huckleberry recipe (Savannah Morning News).

 

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