Williamsburg onion pie


Onion pie with brown ale, Chowning’s Tavern, Williamsburg

I’m back home after a couple of very nice days in Colonial Williamsburg with Ken. Mostly I shot video rather than photos. I’ll post a video after I get the editing done.

Onion pie, it seems, is a Williamsburg specialty. The recipe in the link below calls for boiled eggs sliced into the pie. The version of onion pie that we had at Chowning’s Tavern, however, had a fried egg on top of the pie but no egg inside the pie. I think that would be my preference. I’ll make an onion pie some chilly day and use Chowning’s Tavern’s method. I would assume that this pie was an English favorite that the American colonists brought with them.

Recipe for Williamsburg onion pie

The recipe above is based on an 18th Century recipe:

Wash and pare some potatoes and cut them in slices, peel some onions, cut them in slices, pare some apples and slice them, make a good crust, cover your dish, lay a quarter of a pound of butter all over, take a quarter of an ounce of mace beat fine, a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of beaten pepper, three tea-spoonfuls of salt; mix all together, strew some over the butter, lay a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions, a layer of apples, and a layer of eggs, and so on till you have filled your pie, strewing a little of the seasoning between each layer, and a quarter of a pound of butter in bits, and six spoonfuls of water; close your pie, and bake it an hour and a half. A pound of potatoes, a pound of onions, a pound of apples, and twelve eggs will do.

— Glasse, Hannah, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, page 259

Making persimmon pudding

Two years ago, I wrote thorough post on making persimmon pudding from wild persimmons. This year, Ken and I have made a video.

That was yesterday. I’d be ashamed to tell you how much persimmon pudding is left this morning.

Oligarchs and the rest of us

Politico has a must-read piece today, an interview with Fiona Hill: Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin.’ Part of what makes this interview a must-read is how it exposes the media’s inadequacy in trying to cover something as complicated as Putin’s war against Ukraine. Only a specialist and academic like Fiona Hill can see very far beneath the surface. This interview should have been in the New York Times, not in a secondary source such as Politico.

There’s another important element. Why should a rich American naïf and idiot like Elon Musk figure into this interview? Just what interests do Musk and Putin have in common? Just how often do they talk, and why? This begs a question about another rich American naïf and idiot: Donald Trump. We have never really learned what interests Trump and Putin have in common. How often have Trump and Putin used secret back-channels of communication, and why? Here we could make a long list of the world’s oligarchs, some of whom control countries such as China and Iran, and others who control “countries of particular concern” such as Hungary, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These oligarchs know each other. Otherwise only the banks know who most of them are. They live in a golden bubble that we common folk cannot penetrate. Only occasionally do we get scraps of information about what they do and the power they have over world events. When their interference with democratic governments is noticed, they pull out all the stops to obstruct our view, as with the matter of Russia’s interference with the American election of 2016.

Here one must speculate. Can there be any doubt that much of what drives world events occurs out of our sight, far beneath the surface, visible only to the very rich and the very powerful? Only occasionally do we see the tip of an iceberg, such as the connection between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

My speculation is that the fundamental conflict driving world events today boils down to oligarchs (who can flourish only under corrupt authoritarian governments) versus the people (who can flourish only in democracies). If this is true, then it begs another question: Why do so many ordinary people, who could never possibly gain admittance to the golden bubble in which oligarchs live, admire these oligarchs and take the oligarchs’ side in this global struggle? There is nothing in it for ordinary people other than misery, exploitation, and loss of liberty, once oligarchs are sufficiently entrenched to be untouchable by the people’s power, with elections made obsolete. Deception and propaganda, of course, are the biggest part of the answer. The oligarchs not only have mastered the art of deception, they even make a profit from it. For every five of us who are pretty good at recognizing the truth, there are another five of us who are willing to pay to be deceived.

The interview with Fiona Hill should raise our awareness not only of the great danger in Europe, but also the great danger here in the United States, where a Republican Party that serves the interests of the global oligarchy might succeed in legally taking control of the United States for the purpose of corrupting the American democracy and handing the country over to the oligarchs. That this was (and is) Trump’s purpose is now completely obvious. The Republican Party is all in. A shocking percentage of the American people actually believe that they would gain from this. They’d barely have a pot to piss in unless they could get a piece of the corruption, but at least they’d own the libs. It’s a pity that we can’t send them on a visit to Russia or Iran or North Korea to get a preview of what’s in store even for those who carry water for the oligarchs. For those of us who resisted, it would be much, much worse.

No more chaos on the book shelves

What do two nerds do on a rainy day? They empty all the bookshelves, stack the books on the floor, scan all the titles into a database, and put the books back onto the shelves, in alphabetical order by category. Including the scanning that I had done before Ken’s visit, this was a total of about 30 hours of work. This gives me a whole new appreciation of what librarians do. Now the abbey’s seven bookshelves are all in order.

The database is an app that runs on smartphones named BookBuddy. If a book has a scannable ISBN number, then the app will do all the work. If the book has an ISBN number but no scannable bar code, then the app will recognize the title and lots of other information after the ISBN number is keyed in. For older books with no ISBN number, the app can search by title and identify most books, even books more than a hundred years old.

All of Ken’s books — or at least all of Ken’s books in the U.S. as opposed to his current home in Scotland — are here at the abbey. Ken’s books and mine are remarkably compatible and complementary, as might be expected of literary confederates and former housemates in a house where six books have been written in the last ten years and nursed through the publication process. As for the books that Ken has written, you can find out more at his web site.

Ken is on a speaking tour in the U.S. When he arrived here from Scotland, he brought me bottle of GlenDronach Scotch. That Scotch is from Forgue, 35 miles north of Aberdeen.

Ken’s story lives on …

In many ways, it seems like just yesterday that Ken’s Walden on Wheels was published. That was May 14, 2013. The book continues to sell well. The book earned back Ken’s advance from the publisher several years ago and continues to bring in money for Ken. Ken wrote Walden on Wheels here at Acorn Abbey. I’ll never forget the day I finished reading Ken’s second draft, after he had made some revisions to the ending. He was working in the garden that morning. I walked up to the garden, quite aware that it was a beautiful book that would do well. As I recall, I said to Ken, “I can’t believe that I just walked up the hill and spoke to the person who wrote that book.”

Ken subsequently published two other books, with three books under his belt by the age of 35. He’s a lucky dog, living the life of a successful author. Ken is on another college speaking tour at present. A couple of stops are nearby — N.C. State University in Raleigh, and the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He’ll also be here at the abbey for five or six days. I have long wanted to visit Williamsburg, so I plan to meet up with Ken there. We’ll have a long and bookish discussion agenda for his visit, and probably a litle Scotch to go with it. Knowing Ken, he’ll probably also clean up my messy garden.

The video above was made by an online content producer, Seen Stories.

Oliver Cromwell: Villain or hero?


Source: Wikimedia Commons

What’s remarkable about Oliver Cromwell, 350 years after he died, is that he is still a touchy subject. Why should that be? I would propose that it’s because the conflicts of the 17th Century have not really been settled: What kind of government is best, and what should religion have to do with it? In many ways, we’re still fighting the English Civil War, just as we are still fighting the American Civil War.

Cromwell is on my mind because I just finished reading Sir Walter Scott’s Woodstock, in which Cromwell is a character, as well as the future King Charles II. And Hilary Mantel, who wrote Wolf Hall, died last month.

I am by no means qualified to make any sort of historical argument about Cromwell. I can only throw up my hands and say that it’s clearly complicated. Historians are still arguing about Cromwell and writing about Cromwell. In November, Blackwell’s will release a pricey new tome, volume 2 of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Volume II, February 1649 to December 1653. A recent article in the Guardian about this book asks the question, “Has history got it wrong about Oliver Cromwell’s persecution of Catholics?”

Sir Walter Scott, though he was a royalist, does not demonize his Cromwell character. Scott’s Cromwell is pompous and menacing, but he’s also rational, and he’s not gratuitously cruel.

As for Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell in Wolf Hall, I don’t know, except that according to the reviews I’ve read she is highly sympathetic to Cromwell. I tried to read Wolf Hall but could not get beyond the second page. It was some of the most atrocious writing I’ve ever tried to read, and I made the remark at the time that it’s a wonder that some writers aren’t killed by their editors. I was not the only one. According to Wikipedia, Susan Bassnet wrote in Times Higher Education, “[D]readfully badly written… Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon.” For no reason other than her horrible writing, I am highly skeptical of Hilary Mantel’s take on history.

As for what makes the question complicated, we might start by saying that it depended on where one lived. The English, the Scottish, and the Irish all had good reasons for seeing Cromwell differently. As for the doctrinal and political questions, they’re still argued today. Cromwell was a Puritan, and for that reason alone I can’t imagine that I could like him. In Waller R. Newell’s book Tyrants, Newell writes that “it would be hard to know whether to describe him as a Puritan Machiavellian or a Machavellian Puritan.” Here Newell does not intend the term “Machiavellian” as an insult; rather, he has in mind “the heart of Machiavelli’s dual endorsement of ‘princes’ and ‘peoples.'”

Whatever material historians may recently have uncovered that suggests that Cromwell was more tolerant of Catholics than was previously known, there is no disputing what Cromwell did in Ireland, where, according to Wikipedia, 15 to 50 percent of the population died from Cromwell’s war and the famine and plague that followed.

Here I confess a personal grudge against Cromwell, though it is purely speculative. My paternal ancestors arrived in Virginia at the very tail of the 17th Century. No one has been able to precisely determine where they came from, but the Y-DNA genetic evidence available today strongly suggests that they came from Ireland, not from England. The speculative theory of mine is that those two young brothers left Ireland because of the devastation and redistribution of property caused by Cromwell. They saw no future for themselves in Ireland.

There are grudges aplenty today as the old civil wars continue. We know what happened to King Charles I, and it seems that King Charles II was a pretty good guy. Just yesterday, King Charles III appeared in Scotland’s Dunfermline for some royal duties. According to the media, Charles III and his consort were cheered by the large crowd waiting to see them. When Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, appeared, there were boos along with the cheers. This surprises me, but it also shows how the complexities of the 17th Century live on. According to the Daily Mail, quoting a woman in the crowd:

“Remarking on the booing of Nicola Sturgeon she said: ‘That doesn’t surprise me. She thinks she is Queen of Scotland and doesn’t realise how many people dislike her. We are very happy with the Royal Family we have and with the union, thank you.’”

Another royalist, in Scotland. Yep. It’s complicated. And very little has been settled.

Trump: How will it end?


Authoritarian dreams of global domination. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Salon has an excellent interview today with George Conway, who formerly was a Republican and a Justice Department lawyer. Conway is asked all the right questions. Conway is well positioned to be taken seriously. His answers, I believe, are spot on. Everyone should read this article, but it boils down to this: Yes, Trump is going to be indicted and convicted. But Trump also is going to try to do as much damage to the country as possible as he goes down, just as he did when he was voted out of the White House:

Trump ‘will be convicted of multiple felonies’: George Conway on the bumpy road ahead
Longtime GOP lawyer says Trump won’t take a deal and will call for MAGA violence — but his time is almost up

But even with Trump ruined and silenced, we still will be stuck with the Republican Party. Conway says:

“Trump is also going to cause damage to the Republican Party. The party is finally going to realize that Trump will take them down with him. It is going to be very ugly all around. In the end, though, it will get better. Once Trump is dealt with, there’s the other problem that must be confronted: Trump let all the termites into the basement of the house. The Big Lie and the election deniers and all the assorted lunatics who have taken up residence in the Republican Party and are now its base must be pushed out.”

Conway wisely deflects some of the deeper questions on the grounds that he is not a psychologist. I’m not a psychologist either, but I’m going to stick my neck out.

I think that one of the things that decent and reasonable people must learn, if the United States ever returns to stability and governability, is that about a third of the population are authoritarians, and that authoritarians always damage the social fabric. In more stable times, these people go about their sorry little lives, unorganized yet always doing the damage they always do. But that damage occurs in much smaller spheres — families, communities, and workplaces. But if an uber-authoritarian with a big megaphone comes along with the right lies and stirs up enough rage, then an entire country can find itself in danger. There are only two requirements: A total madman such as Donald Trump, and a megaphone to retail the lies and rage, which the right-wing media and social media have eagerly supplied to Trump and Trumpism.

It is considered shrill and rude to say it, but I believe that it has to be said. That is that the line between authoritarian and “conservative” is thin and vague. The difference is that conservatives retain their decency and moral sanity. Authoritarians do not. George Conway is a conservative, but he is not an authoritarian. Hence Conway eventually saw through Trump and felt shame for having been deceived. The great danger to democracy occurs when authoritarians and conservatives vote the same way. Combined, they come to more than 50 percent, though probably only barely more than 50 percent. It’s probably reasonable to say that about 30 percent of the population are hopeless authoritarians, and about 20 percent are conservatives who, though regressive, racist, and easily deceived, still have a grip on decency and moral sanity.

Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist, would have us believe that conservatives and authoritarians are just as psychologically and morally competetent as the rest of us, but that they just have different “moral foundations.” But love for authority, and the hatred of out-groups, are sorry, and dangerous, moral foundations. As I said, I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that Jonathan Haidt is dangerously wrong and has done great harm by encouraging blindness to the actual nature of authoritarianism. Conservatives teeter between clarity and delusion, as Conway says in the interview when he acknowledges his shame for voting for Trump in 2016 and for not seeing sooner what Trump really is. But authoritarians are not capable of that kind of insight, and they’re not going to change. That’s where we are today: Authoritarians quickly got on board with Trump. The Republican Party brought the easily deceived conservatives on board. Combined, they have enough power to threaten democracy and the rule of law, the barriers that stand in the way of their dream of total authority over the rest of us.

The Republican Party should have kept Trump from running for president back in 2015. One of the purposes of political parties is to screen candidates, keep out the crazies, and field candidates who will promote the party’s principles. But the Republican Party, having abandoned its principles to decay into a Trump cult, has failed again and again to do its job. My guess is that Republicans believe that sticking with Trump is their only hope for the 2022 mid-terms. But if the Republican Party retains any grip on political sanity, it will pivot away from Trump after November 8 and start to cut Trump loose, knowing that Trump is going down and that Trump as a strategy for 2024 would be a recipe for the biggest landslide against Republicans in history. Then the question will be: Will the Republican Party start to recover its political and moral sanity? Or will it find another Trump to ride all the way to hell?

Tofu foo yung

I was having a protein craving, which caused me to think of egg foo yung. When I had my own chickens, I used to make it. But it occurred to me that mashed tofu, with the right seasonings and some sort of binder, might make a nice foo yung. After Googling, I saw that tofu foo yung is a thing. I’m certainly not the first to think of it.

As with just about everything I cook, I read recipes for ideas, then I do what seems right for my diet and my taste. So, for my version of tofu foo yung:

Mash the tofu with a fork. Add just enough gluten flour to serve as a binder. Season it well. Turmeric or curry powder will add color. As with all Chinese cooking, umami is the key. Trader Joe’s umami seasoning, which relies largely on dried mushrooms, works great in all sorts of meaty vegetarian dishes. To give the gluten flour a bit of a boost as a binder, I add about a teaspoon of potato starch. Brewer’s yeast adds color and protein as well as umami. The moisture in the tofu probably is all you need. But if you include too much gluten flour and need a little liquid, try tomato juice. Peas and some chopped onion are good additions. But I think that tofu foo yung doesn’t have enough binding power to hold a lot of vegetables together the way eggs can. The gluten flour adds protein, and it also gives a nice meaty bite to vegan protein dishes. The bite and texture of tofu foo yung is a lot like eggs.

In the frying pan, I start with almost round balls of the mixture. But I gradually press it down and flatten it as the gluten sets up. You’ll need a nice, savory gravy, of course. I use flour as a thickener, with tamari and some Better Than Bouillon to darken the gravy and add umami. Garlic powder improves all Chinese sauces.

How much does cursive matter anymore?


⬆︎ Spencerian script, 1884. This was the ideal in business correspondence. Source: Wikipedia.

The Atlantic has an interesting piece this morning by a former Harvard president: “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive: How will they interpret the past?” The article mentions that learning to write in cursive was dropped from the standard American curriculum in 2010. This new generation, now in college, “represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.”

To my surprise, as a lover of classic literature and obsolete technologies (such as typewriters), I find myself wondering if this is really such a bad thing. The ability to read and write cursive is a fine ability to have, certainly. But the question is, given that today’s young people need to learn so much to have a chance in the modern world, is cursive really worth the effort? I think not. There just isn’t time. Keyboards are ubiquitous now.

When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, keyboards existed. But students in elementary school were not allowed to touch them. There was a typewriter in the school office, of course. And there was a typewriter in a workroom that teachers could use to type stencils for the mimeograph machine. Typing class was not offered until the ninth grade or later.

I was in the sixth or seventh grade when, after months of begging, I got my first typewriter. Though there weren’t a lot of books in the house other than a set of encyclopedias, my father had a copy of 20th Century Typewriting. I used that book to teach myself to type correctly. The book was a classic that went through several editions. I came across a reference to the book recently in a discussion of typewriters, and I immediately bought a copy from an online bookseller, because in retrospect it clearly was one of the most important books of my childhood.

The theory with cursive was that it made writing faster, because it wasn’t necessary to lift the pen. But some studies have shown that, at least today, people can print as fast as they can write in cursive. I think the argument is a sound one: We don’t need to learn to write cursive anymore. Whether we need to learn to read it is a separate question. But I also wonder if it’s truly that difficult to read cursive, even if you can’t write it. We recognize many fonts, after all, including cursive fonts. I am skeptical of the claim that cursive looks like hieroglyphs to Generation Z. Next time I run into a Gen Z’er, I’ll do the experiment.

Back in the days when handwriting was a constant form of communication, we recognized each other’s handwriting. That, to be sure, is a sad thing to lose. But society is not going to fall apart because of that.

As writing in cursive has become obsolete, learning to type well, I would argue, has become even more important — to social lives as well as to careers. When people avoid email and instead want to talk on the phone, I always suspect that it’s because they’re poor typists. Tough. I still refuse to talk on the phone.

Show me a person who types well, and I will show you a person who very probably lives well. It’s typing (even with the thumbs) that now provides our social glue and that enables the world’s machinery to keep turning.


⬆︎ Notice the similarity between my mother’s signature and the teacher’s handwriting on the front of the report card. The shape of the letters was standardized, of course. And I’m pretty sure that Luna Sutphin also was one of my mother’s teachers. My grades averaged out to straight A’s for the school year, but look at that pesky B+ in arithmetic. Mathematics has always been my intellectual weakness, and it only got worse as the math got harder. Calculators to the rescue!

Balmoral


Source: Wikimedia Commons

The media are so full of pieces about Queen Elizabeth II that I hesitate out of modesty and the risk of redundancy to add to it. We Americans may be more interested in royalty than the British, probably because we don’t have royalty. But, as other pieces about Elizabeth II have said, she was a constant in my life for my entire life. All world events, past and present, are somehow reflected in the British monarchy. An era has ended.

I am pretty sure that there are not very many ways in which I envy the fabulously rich and privileged. But one thing I do envy is the having of many homes, and thus the ability to move around with the seasons. It is said that Elizabeth II was happiest when she was at Balmoral. That certainly makes sense to me.

We lesser types with lesser fortunes may move during our lifetimes, usually for economic reasons, but rarely for adventure. We don’t have the privilege of moving with the seasons. When people become rich, a second home will usually be among their first acquisitions. For those of us who lack the riches, we must sit tight in one place and make do with summer heat and winter ice.

Travel is some compensation. But, when we travel, we move too fast, and we don’t have time to linger. Hereafter, when I am reminded of Elizabeth II, I think I will think of her at Balmoral, not in London or at Windsor. I remember reading — I hope it’s true — that after her death Balmoral will become a kind of museum to her reign, open to the public. Charles III, I might guess, has other homes to which he is more attached. So maybe we will all get to have a look at Balmoral someday.

The fate of us commonfolk is to figure out how to do the best job we can of learning how to live well on a little. But Balmoral isn’t the only thing for which we might look to Elizabeth II for something to admire. It’s in finding our own ways, much more modest, to engage the era in which we live. Elizabeth’s bravery and energy have set a standard — from working as a mechanic during World War II to being on her feet, smiling, just days before her death, to greet a new Prime Minister. What a life.