MarysLibrary

Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Lars Thorvold, age 12, of Duluth, Minnesota, is in a tragic situation. The lady who has been making lutefisk for St Olaf's (Missouri Synod) is on the injured list and

...Lars' father -- Gustav Thorvold, of Duluth's Lars and Sons bakery, and one of the most conspicuous Norwegians between Cloquet and Two Harbors -- promised everyone in St Olaf's Fellowship Hall that there would be no break in lutefisk continuity; his family would step in and carry on the brutal Scandinavian tradition for the benefit of the entire Twin Ports region.

The lingering smell of the lutefisk did nothing for Lars' social life, but by age 18 he had ...become a wizard in the kitchen and by his unintentionally mastering the tragic hobby of lutefisk preparation its potentency was skyrocketing. Lutherans were driving from as far away as Fergus Falls to try the "Thorvold lutefisk," and there wasn't an attractive young woman among them.

Lars hated making lutefisk and complained bitterly. Take some pride in your work, son," Gustav said, and took away his lefse in punishment.

Admittedly, most of J Ryan Stradal's novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is not that sardonic but it is entertaining throughout. Lars' daughter, Eva, who is weaned on pureed pork roast and heirloom tomatoes, becomes a chef. The rest of the novel is a set of stories telling us how she learned to cook her signature dishes: walleye, venison, pepper jelly, and succotash, along with pork shoulder. My favorite is the part where her cousin quits growing pot and gives her his equipment and she experiments with raising very hot peppers in her bedroom closet.

One of the things that Eva hated the most about being a kid was how everyone always told her that childhood was the best time of their entire lives, and don't grow up too fast, and enjoy these carefree days while you can. In those moments, her body felt like the world's smallest prison and she escaped in her mind to her chile plants, resting on rock wool substrate under a grow light in a bedroom closet, as much a prisoner of USDA hardiness zone 5b as she was.

...Eva's last batch of chocolate habs was just over 500,000 Scoville heat units, according to ... friends at the Iowa State Food Science Lab, and that number was unbearable for most people. This new crop Eva estimated at close to double that, giving her chiles a heat index almost halfway to Mace.

The people you meet in this book are very real. I know some of them. Other names and other places, but I'll bet you know them too. 

The book has lots of recipes, unusual for literary fiction, and these are recipes you could actually use in your own kitchen, wherever it is.

 

The Dresses of the 1860s

The Mimi Matthews blog has posted another fine overview of a decade of fashion, this time the 1860 when dresses went from the full hoop to an exaggerated bustle. You can see many photos and informative comments on the blog here.

My favorite of the dress of this decade? This cotton day dress from 1862.

The Hired Girl (who puts the milk dish in the meat sink)

Laura Amy Schlitz won the Newbery medal a few years back for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! and I think she should have won again this year for her YA novel, The Hired Girl.

I fell in love with the girl of the title, Joan Skaggs, 14, who in 1911 has run away from her cold, severe father and the grueling work on his farm, renaming herself Janet Lovelace, age 18, and taking a job as a hired girl, a parlor maid for the Rosenbach family in Baltimore.

She wants the family and the housekeeper, Malka, to like her and see that she is a hard worker, so when the breakfast dishes come down from the dining room on the dumb waiter she washes them. 

I picked up the tureen. It was white with painted flowers and a little cupid sitting on the lid. It looked special to me, [it is special, it's Meissen] so I washed it very carefully, and I was drying it when Malka came into the room.

She saw the water in the sink and the dish in my hand, and her eyes did that shocked-accusing thing they do so well. And she shrieked. . . . "What have you done!" with such ferocity I really thought I'd broken the dish -- except there it was in my hands, without so much as a chip, and clean as a pearl.

And that was how Janet/Joan learned about kashrut. She had washed a milk dish in the meat sink. The Rosenbachs were Jewish and she was a Catholic girl from the countryside and knew about Jews only from the Old Testament. The Rosenbachs were Reform and so the Meissen does not need to be buried but Malka does leave it out in the rain and washes the sink with scalding water. 

Janet wants nothing so much as to get an education and be a teacher. Mr Rosenbach allows her to read his books at night after her work is done and although her innocence and romanticism get herself into a good many scrapes with the family, she is a very hard worker and comes to love the old housekeeper and the rest of the family.

Will she ever get that schooling she years for? Or will she fall in love and marry young? Will the Rosenbach finally get fed up with her and send her away without a reference? Or will she go to work for a nice Catholic family as the parish priest wants her to do? Read it and find out. It will make you laugh out loud.

10 Years of Blogging at Mary's Library

Jan 17 is the anniversary of my first blog, back on Blogspot. In that post I listed some books I was reading and then talked about what they were about and what I thought of them. 

It took me a while to get into the swing and over the years I've sometimes gone a couple of weeks without posting and thought about letting the blog expire. I moved to Typepad when I got mad at frequent problems with Blogspot (since resolved - and I'm kinda sorry I left.)

Having a blog of my own has drawn me into the blogging world and I follow some other folks' blogs that began more recently than mine but are much more entertaining and informative, like Random Jottings and Cornflower Books.

This January I've again made a New Year's Resolution to post regularly. It would take so little time to post just the author, title, and photo of the cover of the books I'm reading or have read. And 2016 may be the year that I do that.

For a taste of what I was posting back then, here is a post about my reaction to Martin Luther King's death and my admiration for Taylor Branch's three-volume history of the MLK years.

What they were wearing in 1850

 

 They were wearing dresses with enormous skirts held out by enormous hoops. This made even thick waists look a lot thinner and bosoms fuller. Read about it here at Mimi Matthews' blog.

 

Wisdom of Coco

"The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive." -Coco Chanel

The Collect for the Feast of the Epiphany

O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles: Mercifully grant, that we, which know thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of thy glorious Godhead; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

        -- Book of Common Prayer, 1666

Sunday Scene

This is a photo of the porch at Yaddo, one of the most well-known of the artists' colonies in the US. In about 1900 Spencer and Katrina Trask turned their estate in Saratoga Springs, New York, into an artists' retreat. Composers, novelists, and poets such as Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thompson, and Sylvia Plath have worked there. Mystery writer Patricia Highsmith left her entire estate to Yaddo.

The name rhymes with "shadow" and is a mispronunciation by one of the Trask children of the estate's original name, The Shadows.

I post the picture because of the chair. It is one of those turn of the 20th century pseudo-medieval pieces of furniture beloved of William Morris that you see in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. And I have one. Mine is bright red and it's surprisingly comfortable.

If I were to win the lottery, which is unlikely because I've never bought a lottery ticket, but if I were to win the lottery for a gazillion bucks, I'd create a museum for chairs. Louis XVI chairs and Eames chairs, and Stickley chairs, and odd specimens like my Yaddo chair. 

New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year!