Culture – Page 50 – Into the Woods

Old Southern house trimmings

Much of the South’s old rural housing stock is falling into ruin. This is the case with the Yadkin Valley house that my mother was born in. It was built by her grandfather. The house, and most of the land the house sits on, is no longer in the family.

I’m considering salvaging a tiny bit of tradition by duplicating the trim on the front porch posts of my mother’s childhood home. My brother did this. He copied the pattern and used it for the front porch of his house, which is about 25 years old.

Though the pattern is not exactly Gothic revival, I’m thinking that tradition may trump strict adherence to the Gothic revival style of Acorn Abbey.

The methods of 100 years ago

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so on. The PDF file is more than 100 megabytes. Everything is arranged in alphabetical order.

Stilton

Note to myself: Those glass plates don’t photograph very well. I need to go to some junk shops and find some photogenic dishes.

Blue cheese and garlic are the best of friends. Though I love a good Roquefort, I prefer a good Stilton. I suspect this is because the Roquefort (sheep’s milk) is richer than Stilton (cow’s milk). Blue cheese loves onions, too. The Fat Ladies, every ounce of them English, in one of their cooking shows, made a Stilton and onion soup that I made at home a couple of times, and it was good. The dressing on the salad in the photo contains a whole head of garlic. What a great peasant supper — a garlicky salad, Stilton, and a loaf of homemade peasant bread.

Rural England is a dairy culture, and they make great cheeses. Last time I was there, they still home-delivered fresh milk in bottles. Friends in Wales once served me for dinner a whole array of English and Welsh cheeses, including the Welsh Caerphilly, which you can sometimes find in American stores.

As for the Fat Ladies, one of them (Jennifer Paterson) is dead now. Netflix has the DVDs of their cooking show. Their show is extremely entertaining and rich with ideas for those of us who respect peasant food.

The Fat Ladies (YouTube)

Le Cordon Bleu in Paris

Serving English cooking. The photo is about 10 years old.

If you saw Julie and Julia, in which Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, you saw the film version of what Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris was like in the 1940s. It’s been 10 years since I was in Paris, but I came across these photos recently while pulling files off an old computer.

The event in the photos is an international buffet cooked by the students at Le Cordon Bleu. They make foods from their native cultures. A friend of mine was a student at Le Cordon Bleu at the time, and he took me to this event. I was not surprised to see that the Asian students’ tables were mobbed, while there was only a small group around the English students’ table. That kind of snobbery is a shame, because the English students had cooked an amazing example of an English Christmas dinner.

Le Cordon Bleu does these international buffets several times a year, I believe. They are mobbed.

Serving Asian cooking…

I’ve eaten in lots of places — Bangkok, New Delhi, London, Ireland, Denmark, and all over Mexico and the United States. Paris is not my favorite food city. Parisian food is just too rich and meaty to appeal to me, so I found myself going to Asian restaurants or to this vegetarian restaurant near Notre Dame, Le Grenier de Notre-Dame. The vegetarian food there is only so-so. Americans do vegetarian food much better. The cities with the best vegetarian food, in my opinion, are New York and Los Angeles. The food in Ireland is about a million times better than the food in England, especially outside of London.

I don’t aspire to, or fawn over, haute cuisine or trendy food. To me, it’s all about honest foods skillfully prepared. I’ve been asked a few times to name the restaurant that I’ve most enjoyed. That’s pretty easy: Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Alice Waters‘ restaurant.

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death

I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century.

In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that also became a best-seller: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This book caused quite a stir when it was first published, and I had long meant to read it. I finally did, after I found a copy of it in a junk store in Madison for 75 cents.

Centuries before, the ideal of chivalry had provided a little light in the darkness of the Middle Ages. But by the 14th Century, chivalry had fallen into decadence. The nobility lived as parasites off the labor of the peasantry and gave nothing to speak of in return. War and extravagant consumption, it seems, were all the nobility lived for. Wars went on and on from their own inertia, though no one even remembered what they were fighting for.

The church too, in centuries past, had preserved a tiny light of order and learning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but by the 14th Century the church was as decadent and corrupt and parasitic as the nobility. Everything was for sale: the sacraments, annulments, dispensations, pardons, offices, emoluments. The church also was torn by schism. There were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon. Torture and Inquisition were highly refined and ruthlessly practiced.

The peasantry was miserably poor, lived in filthy hovels, was racked with disease and saddled with crushing taxes. Up to two-thirds of their children did not live to be adults. Several times during the century, there were peasant revolts. But always those revolts were put down as quickly as the nobles could rally enough men on horseback to cut the peasants down.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the Black Death, which killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population. There were no longer enough people to till the fields, further increasing the misery for those who survived the plague.

By 1415, French chivalry was in ruins, with thousands of nobles dead in the mud at the Battle of Agincourt. Those ruins of the fortresses and abbeys of the Middle Ages that we see today: Much of that was not the result of centuries of gradual decay. Rather, it was destruction caused by the wars, raiding and pillaging of the 14th Century.

A saint was born out of this ruin: Joan of Arc.

Why is this relevant to a relocalization blog? Because human nature doesn’t change. We would do well to not forget how thin is the veneer of civilizaton, or how fragile the rule of law. No matter what the cost of war, we humans never seem to learn. Elites, glorifying war, have the same tendency to become ever richer and to make ever greater wagers to increase their wealth and power. Again and again we find that the times of greatest luxury for elites are the times of greatest hardship for those who actually do the work.

To quote Barbara Tuchman:

“Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.”

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. 720 pages.

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. There also were health regulations to deal with. If I remember correctly from what a dairy farmer told me many years ago, to sell top-grade milk required that the milk be chilled to a low temperature — 34 or 35 degrees, as I recall — within minutes of coming from the cow. Small operations couldn’t support the cost of this refrigeration equipment.

This old dairy, on Mountain Road near Danbury in Stokes County, was typical. The building in which the milking was done was usually made of concrete blocks. This was because the building was constantly being hosed down and washed.

The smaller room to the right, with the sink, is the clean room where vessels were washed and where the milk was brought. The larger room to the left with the cow-sized door is the milking room.

The sink was for washing the milk cans and other vessels.

Recommendment: Lark Rise to Candleford

BBC: The hamlet of Lark Rise

I wonder if the BBC is making a particular effort to make more period pieces that reflect the lives of ordinary people, rather than aristocrats. For example, BBC Films was involved in the making of Bright Star, which is about John Keats. Keats and those around him were middle class, not aristocrats. There also is the excellent BBC television series Cranford.

In 2008, the BBC came out with Lark Rise to Candleford. This is about the people in the tiny hamlet of Lark Rise, and the more prosperous people of the nearby village of Candleford. These are honest stories based on the realities of village life — gossip, family trouble, poverty, and social jostling. The series is available on DVD, and from Netflix.

Let's hear it for the chickens

March 4: four eggs. There are three nests in the henhouse, but they always share and take turns.

My four chickens have averaged slightly better than three eggs a day all winter, and it was a cold winter. Even though it’s still early March, they’re already starting to return to their four-eggs-a-day standard of productivity. They have only ever broken one egg, and that was when they were young and inexperienced. I myself have accidentally broken three or four.

They are content, yet demanding, always hoping for treats, which they get, every day. Sometimes the best I can do is cut up some raw potatoes or carrots, or maybe apples, or pluck the outer leaves from a head of cabbage. Their favorite treats are kitchen scraps — peelings and leftovers. Pasta drives them wild. They seem to think it’s worms. On cold mornings they relish a warm breakfast — cracked grains mixed with leftover gravy or soup. During the summer, finding treats for them is easy because the kitchen always has lots of summer produce. During the winter, treats are more of a challenge. They always have laying mash in their feeder. But it’s treats that keep things interesting.

Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about backyard chickens these days, but here’s one of the best pieces I’ve come across. Peter Lennox, an academic, waxes philosophical on the keeping of chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

The family cow

My grandmother Mary Lillian Bowman Dalton with one of her cows, c. 1925, Laurel Fork, Virginia

Yesterday while walking back from the mailbox, I was admiring one of my neighbors’ pastures. It has a good fence and a thick stand of grass ready to turn lush as soon as spring arrives. I realized that, in rural areas like this with a history of family farms, it would be relatively easy to bring back the family cow.

Consider how quickly backyard chickens have come back into fashion. There is even a new bimonthly magazine for backyard chickens. Chickens, of course, require far less infrastructure, less space, and less labor than a cow. But if the day ever comes when we see severe unemployment (meaning that people find themselves at home most of the time) combined with inflation in food prices, I suspect that some hardy rural people who have the pastureland will go back to keeping a cow.

In talking with Ken Ilgunas last weekend about my oath to measure my success here by how effectively I can turn back the clock to 1935, I mentioned how I was the last generation to witness, and, in a child’s way at least, to participate in the operation of family farms. Neither the economics nor the infrastructure of the family farm is mysterious to me. Almost all of my relatives lived on small farms, and some of those farms were in operation before 1900. I have gathered the eggs, seen cows milked, seen butter churned, seen mules pulling plows, unloaded hay, fed and watered the horse, helped with the tobacco crop, and seen the wood cookstoves blazing and steaming while Sunday dinner was cooked. Apart from the land and the infrastructure required for a small farm, it’s a matter of labor. Somebody has to be home all day. A few strong young’uns are an indispensable asset.

Would I like to have a cow? No. I don’t have the pasture space. I’m also content with soybean milk, which I could make for myself if I had to. But cows have an amazing capability that ensures them of a niche in a relocalized economy — they can turn grass into milk.

There’s a lot of material on the Internet about family cows. This is a good place to start.

Thank goodness I'm out of style

Approved house style: New York Times

I can think of a hundred ways to psychoanalyze the people who set themselves up as lords of style and look down on the rest of us. But I’d rather try to be nice and think of it as a serious question: Why is there such a thriving industry and subculture of style?

The best answer I can come up with is that the style industry is an arm of consumerism. It’s to teach us to disdain and devalue what we have so that we’ll buy something new. It’s to teach us that if we don’t buy the new styles, people will make fun of us.

Invariably, the houses that newspapers feature in their architecture columns are boxes. The box in the photo above was certain to be featured in the New York Times, because, not only is it a box, it’s a crooked box that cost $1.4 million. There’s this quote from the owner of the house: “If we just produced another thatched cottage, we might as well still be living in caves.”

The plaid outfit speaks (loudly) for itself.

As for the cabbage, the food writer for Salon informs us that people used to eat cabbage, but cabbage fell into disrepute and something ruined its reputation. I never knew. The way to redeem cabbage’s reputation and make it fit to eat again, he tells us, is to give it a “ripping sear in smoking-hot oil.” Maybe later.

I live in a cottage, my best outfits are from L.L. Bean, and I eat cabbage the old-fashioned way. With the capital I save from not being stylish, I might be able to afford an out-of-style landscape, and a garden.

Approved style of dressing: New York Times

Approved style of eating cabbage: Salon