Here it is Friday and I haven't posted anything yet about last Sunday's vintage dinner! Thank goodness for "Independence Day Observed" - it gives me the chance to do some serious catching up on all fronts. (I'll do my observing tomorrow.)
Eggs Scrambled with Chopped Chives or Parsley
Salad of Shredded Lettuce and Carrots and Chopped Sweet Pickle
Roll
Blueberry Pudding
Recommended by The American Woman's Cook Book (1945) as a menu for a Saturday evening, this was a wonderful change of pace after a hot summer's day. Just the kind of the meal that would allow a housewife some extra time to get her children through their Saturday night baths... I added some Parsley to my Scrambled Eggs. Most of you could probably scramble eggs with your eyes closed, but I thought you might enjoy seeing a '40s take on the recipe.
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BATTERED OR SCRAMBLED EGGS
In a frying-pan, place one teaspoon of butter for each egg. Beat the eggs until the whites and yolks are well mixed. Season with salt and pepper and add one to three tablespoons of milk or cream for each egg. Pour into the hot fat and cook slowly, stirring constantly until the eggs are of the desired consistency. Serve at once. A little onion-juice or chopped parsley may be added to the eggs, if desired.
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I made the salad using iceberg lettuce, carrot, and chopped sweet gherkins. The whole-wheat roll was purchased at the supermarket --- a nod to the foods commercially available by the 1940s. The Blueberry Pudding was a simple cottage pudding with fresh blueberries added to the batter. It was so good, but I'm afraid it'll be the last of my desserts from these dinner menus for a little while. (The leftovers are way too tasty!) I'm going to substitute either a baked custard, sherbet, or pudding for the vintage suggestions.
The summer rains have moved into this part of the desert. I use the word "rains" loosely - it rains for about 5-10 minutes in the late afternoon - but the storms do stir up some lovely wind and cloudy skies... So it was time to clean my bedroom yesterday evening and a storm had just passed by. For the first time in all these months, I had to find an alternative to airing my bedcovers and pillows on the landing outside my door. The railing was wet and water was still dripping from the roof. Hmmm. What's a good housewife-who's-not-a-wife-and-works-outside-the-home-five-days-a-week to do? I reached for The Manual. Aha!
Remove all bed covers; stretch over end of bed, or over chairs, off the floor.
That - I could do. And at least it gives you a chance to open the windows and air the mattress. Making up my bed again afterwards wasn't quite as satisfying an experience as it usually is. I didn't get to beat the pillows or give the bedcovers a good shake - didn't want to stir up any fresh dust indoors - but it was a decent trade in a pinch.
Have you ever read Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon books? I'm reading the second one, Leaving Home (1987), and there's a thought he expressed in passing that's making me especially mindful these days of the way my legs look. (Mindful to the point where I may have overdone it with my new exercises yesterday --- my legs are aching this morning!) It's a passage in the opening essay to the book that made me think of my legs. A beautiful passage in more ways than one. It makes me laugh and weep a little at the same time. I laugh, because I'd like to be known by my nieces as the aunt with fabulous legs!When I was little I didn't think of grownups as having bare skin; grownups were made of wool clothing, only kids were bare naked...
Every time I read a book about how to be smarter, how not to be sad, how to raise children and be happy and grow old gracefully, I think "Well, I won't make those mistakes, I won't have to go through that," but we all have to go through that. Everything they went through, we'll go through. Life isn't a vicarious experience. You get it figured out and then one day life happens to you. You prepare yourself for grief and loss, arrange your ballast and then the wave swamps the boat.
Everything they went through: the loneliness, the sadness, the grief, and the tears--it will all come to us, just as it came to them when we were little and had to reach up to get hold of their hand, when we knew them by the shape of their legs. Aunt Marie had fat little legs, I held her hand one cold day after a blizzard, we climbed snowdrifts to get to the store and buy licorice whips. She said, "Come on, we can make it, don't slip," and soon she was far behind, a fat lady in a heavy coat with a fur collar, leaning into the wind, wheezing from emphysema, and sometime later she died. She knew that death was only a door to the kingdom where Jesus would welcome her, there would be no crying there, no suffering, but meanwhile she was fat, her heart hurt, and she lived alone with her ill-tempered little dogs, tottering around her dark little house full of Chinese figurines and old Sunday Tribunes. She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, "You don't care about me. You say you do but you don't. If I died tomorrow, I don't know as you'd even go to my funeral." I was six. I said, cheerfully, "I'd come to your funeral," looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears.
Every tear she wept, that foolish woman, I will weep every one before I am done and so will you. We're not so smart we can figure out how to avoid pain, and we cannot walk away from the death we owe.
So true. For all our modern technologies, shopping malls, and miracle drugs, we can't avoid the mistakes and fears and losses that shaped the lives of our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, and their great-grandmothers before them... If you've never read any of Keillor's books - or listened to his marvelous Prairie Home Companion on NPR - you've got something wonderful in store. He paints such a frank and beautiful picture of life in a small Minnesota town. His bits in Lake Wobegon Days on the scandal of air conditioning and over-ambitious tomato gardeners --- genius!
