Categories
1950-1999 Uncategorized War

Old Fashioned Cornbread at the Whistle Stop Cafe, 1993

My momma and Aunt Idgie ran a cafe. It wasn’t nothing more than a little pine-knot affair, but I’ll tell you one thing: we always ate and so did everybody else who ever came around there asking for food….and that was black and white. I never saw Aunt Idgie turn down a soul, and she was known to give a man a little drink if he needed it….” – Stump Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

I found my way into writing my initial thoughts on Brexit through an “old-fashioned” pork pie seen at a food fair on the dream-like day of the result, and being suddenly overwhelmed with visceral anger at my country. Yesterday, while making what Fannie Flagg calls “Old Fashioned Cornbread” from her 1993 Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook I started thinking about the tumultuous mess of Trump’s first week in office. The day which also marked Holocaust Remembrance Day (and a White House statement which managed to not mention the Jewish people by name), Trump signing an Executive Order shutting the US to all refugees for four months, and to Syrian refugees indefinitely, and pictures of Theresa May holding hands with Trump and flattering the Republican Party on their shared values with the Conservative Party. Her announcement that Trump is “100%” behind NATO looked like nothing more than Chamberlain’s “peace in our time”.

The similarities between Brexit and the rise of Trump are so parallel that it almost feels unreal, and to me as a history graduate, all I can see is a mountain of future essays tying together all the strands that brought us here. This period will become almost a cliche of essay titles, I’m sure. In a way, the events of the past year feel as if they have come out of the blue, a stone flung into a tranquil lake, but of course our progress to the point of wherever this takes us will look clearer in the history books. I’ve read enough history books to know that war is usually the conclusion of a set of circumstances like this, which feel so familiar and yet so unknown at the same time.

Trump is a schmuck – there is no better word I have come across to describe him. Part fool, part conman, and yes, the literal meaning of the word – dick – too. Especially that. A shyster involved with the Mafia, the Russian mob, fined $10 million in 2015 for money laundering, a thuggish litigation addict, fined for racist landlord discrimination, an admitted practitioner of sexual assault. A man who apparently has little concentration, cunning in spades but little intellect, and whose word means precisely nothing. Yet a man who thinks of himself as an intellectual giant, and who treats words rather as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

That this can be also used to perfectly describe what will be Theresa May’s one appearance in the quoting dictionaries, “Brexit means Brexit”, is just more meat for those essays of the future. And what do we have to combat these words? A media which many are turning away from, choosing, incredibly, to believe instead that hyper-partisan news sources speak more unbiased truth. “Fake news” can be whatever disagrees with the individual’s personal stance now, and I think it’s a dangerous path indeed. Still, there’s going to be some astounding journalism on show in the years to come, and some damn good comedy too.

In such a short space of time, world events have been so interesting that the news has started to run anxiously though my head like an extra verse to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire:

Donald Trump, CIA, Vlad Putin, Theresa May, 

Alec Baldwin, George Orwell, John Hurt, Mike Pence

Tiny tweeting hands, tiny crowds, dancing to “My Way”,

Refugees, Mexico, #Fuckingwall, maybe a fence?

A song from 1989, also pertinent as it’s the 80s I’m thinking of just as much as the 30s. The parallels to the 30s are obvious to anyone who’s studied the period – the popular movements, the distrust of the old orders, the shutting down of opponents. But in some ways Trump is the quintessential 80s man, the personification of all that garish money-splashing and selfishness that was one side of the decade. Not least because Bret Easton Ellis presciently made Trump Patrick Bateman’s hero in American Psycho, set during the 80s Wall Street boom.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe”, a book and film I adore, looks at both eras, a depression-era tale told in flashback from the 80s. A tale which involves sentiment about America’s past, the Ku Klux Klan, racism, lesbianism and the strength of women. What with the Women’s March of a week ago, the largest single-day demonstration in American history, and involving nearly 5 million participants across the globe, this feels relevant. And the impossibly sad story of Emmett Till has reared its head from the history books with the revelation yesterday that the reason, small as it was, for the horrifying murder of a 14-year-old, wasn’t even true at all. And the order banning the acceptance of refugees to the US on Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the day that a Twitter account called St. Louis Manifest was tweeting the fates of all the passengers on the St Louis, the ship of German Jewish refugees turned away by the US in 1939, and who mostly perished in the Holocaust. The lessons from history hitting us in the face right now are almost unbearable.

In 1993 Fannie Flagg wrote in The Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook,

“Which brings me to the main reason I wanted so much to write this book. Lately it seems everyone is mad at someone, with groups on every corner, on the radio, on television, screaming about something or someone or other they don’t like. And there is so much anger in the air that you almost see it like a thick fog. In times like this, I think it is particularly important to try to be as calm and as happy as possible. And I don’t know about you, but I have always been happiest where food is concerned.”

The book was inspired by Fried Green Tomatoes fans asking whether her fictional cafe was based on a real place, which it was. It was The Irondale Cafe in Irondale, Alabama, set up in the 1930s by Flagg’s aunt Bess, who ran it for 50 years. A woman who loved feeding anyone and everyone, and, from her picture in the book, appears to be Idgie Threadgoode all over. It’s still there too, in downtown Irondale, right next to the train tracks, just like the Whistlestop Cafe. The recipes in this book come from the dishes traditionally served there.

Cornbread is one of those quintessential American food traditions which I had never tasted until my year spent going to school in the American South. I lived in Kentucky over 1992 and 1993, the same year this cookbook came out. I have extremely fond memories of iced tea, pimento cheese, buttermilk biscuits (what they call biscuits coming as a big surprise to me) and big blocks of squidgy American cheese you can microwave into a sauce. Less fond memories of the jello salad, lime jelly with vegetables in it, nonsensically served as a side dish. But I’ve never known hospitality like that I experienced in Kentucky. Such kindness and community. And I gained such a sense of enormity of the country, being hundreds of miles from the coast in all directions. It’s difficult for a Brit to get your head round the sheer scale of it all, and I never knew before how attached I was to the idea of being near-ish to the sea no matter where you are in the country.

Fannie Flagg’s cornbread recipe is best done old style in a skillet in the oven. There seems to be a lot of variants on cornbread depending where you are in the country, with an interesting take on the traditions here. Mine is yellow as white cornmeal is harder to come by in the UK. It contains no sugar – the article says this is the northern tradition, with the southern version always sweetened. Which doesn’t quite fit with this definitely Southern recipe, but never mind.


Old Fashioned Cornbread

I swear, this is the best I ever tasted.”

4 cups cornmeal

2 tsp baking soda

4 egg, beaten

4 cups buttermilk

1/2 cup bacon drippings, melted (I used butter)

Preheat oven to 450F (220C)

Combine dry ingredients and make a well in the centre.

Combine eggs, buttermilk and bacon drippings, mixing well; add to cornmeal mixture and beat until smooth.

Heat a well-greased 12-inch cast-iron skillet in the preheated oven until very hot.

Pour batter into hot skillet; bake for 35-45 minutes, or until a knife inserted in centre comes out clean and top is golden brown.

Good luck, America.

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Food & Drink

Barclay’s Lager, 1926

It’s been a strange kind of summer in a strange kind of year. The approach of September usually gives me a feeling of normality being restored – working for a university I still feel tied to the academic calendar, and September always feels more like new year to me than January ever does. After the uproar of the Brexit result, the weird hiatus while our new Prime Minister promptly went on holiday for five weeks has made the referendum result seem like a strange dream while real life was on hold. With the government reconvening (and why was the referendum decided to coincide with that political period when it feels like no one is in charge?) Brexit’s on the real life agenda again and normality is very much not restored in September this year.

I’ve been having a bit of a holiday from the blog too – a huge queue of scanning materials have been building up and I hope to actually get on with it shortly. In the meantime, here’s an advert for Barclay’s British Lager from 1926. Averse as I currently feel to anything overtly flying the flag for British nationalism, I like this advert.

Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926
Hartlepool Mail, 21st May 1926

A seaman’s thirst is quenched by British Lager, Barclay’s being one of the British pioneers in brewing lager. They took advantage of world events – Germany and Austria were the prime source of lager prior to the First World War, but such imports became impossible during the war and Barclay’s set to experimenting with their own brews. They brewed it at 5%, stronger than most beers at the time. After the war they developed a successful export trade in it too – Germany and Austria’s trade being incapacitated and the other big lager producer, the USA, being hobbled by the era of prohibition.

In 1921, the Brewer’s Journal reported on Barclay’s lager in this way (from this link):

“Doubtless they do not imagine that any large trade in this type of beer can at present be looked for from the working classes. The potentiality of trade lies with the middle and upper classes, and with that floating population from the ends of the earth which the Metropolis always embraces.”

Turns out they were wrong about the popularity of lager with the working classes. And the reference to London accepting, “embracing“, people from all “ends of the earth” brings me depressingly back to a time when it feels like the march of history has got a bit lost and is going back on itself, in well-trodden footsteps that lead to nowhere you really want to go.

Categories
1950-1999 Ephemera Games

Funny Bones, 1968

For my birthday treat a few weeks ago, me and my husband went on a very rare kid-free trip to Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head pub to try a special menu – truffled beef stew as devised by Heston for Tim Peake on the International Space Station. The intense meaty, tarragonned stew was beautiful, of course, especially so as it was a menu only available if you wrote in to Channel 4 and were lucky enough to receive a special code after the Heston’s Dinner in Space programme a few months ago. The star of the show, however, was the Sweet Shop cocktail – a heady mix of “skittle-washed vodka”, frothed marshmallow, fruits and popping candy, with a wave of candy floss on top. It sounds far too sweet to be appealing, but it was perfect, like a kind of magical strawberry juice.

sweet shop

We stayed in Maidenhead for the night, and I fell in love with the place – not least because of the unfeasible amount of charity shops selling vintage books that we found, and the very friendly shop keepers within them. We were so keen on the fascinating stock in one shop that the lady behind the counter jokingly offered us a “lock-in”, which sounds like heaven to me. The fact that I loved Maidenhead so much funnily enough feels like a crumb of comfort to me in the current political situation – our new Prime Minister Theresa May is its MP.

We came home with heavy armfuls of new books on the train, and this game, Funny Bones, which was worth its price of £1 just to have a look inside the box at the glorious 60s graphics on the cards.

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Brought out the year after Twister, this was intended as a version of that game as played with cards and teams of two partners. The cards themselves need to be held between the two body parts shown on the cards.

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And this is how you play it:

I’d never heard of it, and was amused to see the none-more-60s description of where this game could be played – not only at birthday parties but also at “Adult Happenings”. “Happenings” always has an orgy vibe about it but it sounded to me like some marketing man trying to get hip with the kids.

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A few of the cards, though…..they could be interpreted with a raised eyebrow.

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And….well, it turns out that this undercurrent was actually a little more *finger bone on the nose bone* than I first thought. Marvin Glass, the creator of the game, seemed to be two parts the Willy Wonka of games, and one part Hugh Hefner. Twister was denounced by some critics of the permissive society as “sex in a box”, and it looks like Marvin Glass had at least one eye on this market too. Here an excellent blog post describes the career and inventions of the man behind an array of classic toys – including SIMON, the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and Mousetrap. Here’s the man himself demonstrating his new invention, the toy hypodermic needle, the Hypo-Phony:

hypo

But it was reading about his feature spread in Playboy magazine that most tickled my funny bone. Titled unambiguously “A Playboy Pad: Swinging In Suburbia”, here are the post watershed “fun and games” Marvin was working on.

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You can see why Playboy were interested, this “pad” was up to the zeitgeist in 60s party terms. He had a “walk-in wet bar”, whatever that is, hi-fi controls built into a marble table, “a grand piano and microphones….awaiting the show-business personalities that invariably attend”, Picasso and Dali pictures on the walls, and a swimming pool.

It makes me think of a Hammer Horror porn film. I have a strange feeling of unease looking at these pictures. Go up the red-lit stairs:

stairso

To the bedroom:

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And then hang out in the huge jacuzzi:

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The best thing is, it depicts people actually playing Funny Bones at this “happening”.

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I guess this was the kind of thing Monty Python was talking about – it breaks the ice at naughty parties.

In those halcyon days of early June, I suspected not that the purchase of this little game would bring me a blog post featuring the International Space Station, Theresa May, 1960s orgies and the game SIMON, but in this post-Brexit hinterland suddenly anything seems possible.

Categories
2000 onwards

Pork Pie and porky pies.

It’s coming up for two weeks since the EU referendum and I’ve only just started to calm down. Not because there’s any more reason to calm down. If anything, things have escalated and it feels like events are just sweeping everyone along like rapid water now. But you can’t sustain the national hysteria we’ve just experienced. “A week is a long time in politics,” said Harold Wilson. Or rather, as he supposedly said. Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever really said any of those famous quotes, and where they came from, if they didn’t.

I was a Remainer, reluctantly laying out the British champagne for the Leavers. But even though the polls showed the creeping popularity of the Leave campaign, I never thought, really, they would win. It seemed that too big a proportion of the population was undecided, and surely they’d vote for the safe option, when it came down to it? But no, the country narrowly voted for the white knuckle ride instead. The plunging markets, the endless resignations, the still unbelievable news that there was no plan. The dawning media realisation that they really should have pressed the issue of that plan. The petitions, the talk of breaking up this disunited kingdom, the fractures that have riven this country in a way never experienced before. Fractures not only between the cities, who largely voted to remain, and the smaller towns and villages, which largely didn’t, but cracks between the generations, affecting family relations in an entirely new way. I know lots of people who either aren’t talking to their parents right now, or else are not talking to them about this, because the generation gap has never felt so wide.

I saw history being invoked time and time again as to why leaving the EU was a good idea – “we were alright before,” “we won two world wars,” – by people who are normally uninterested in history, and seemed to think this was a magic vote to bring back “the good old days”. Never mind lessons of real history, that we deal with conflict stronger together, and that this retreat into selfish, fearful behaviour is the exact opposite to Britain’s Finest Hour in the Second World War, where we were selflessly fighting to save Europe, and we did certainly not win it alone.

On Friday 24th June, still disbelieving that they’d done it, they’d really done it, I went to Aldi where a lovely, twinkly, elderly lady cooed over my toddler daughter. My immediate reaction was “Ugh. I bet you voted Leave, didn’t you?” And that’s here, in Liverpool, which voted Remain by a 58% majority, so the odds were against it. It was an ugly, black thought which I hated thinking.

On Saturday, as the lies of the Leave campaign lay trampled in the dust, and we appeared to be sailing adrift into uncharted waters as British politics descended into turmoil, I took the kids to the park. There was a lovely food fair on, stalls full of artisan pizzas, cheese and chutneys, and I thought I’d buy something for dinner. The pie stall looked appealing, especially one pie which was called “Old English Pork Pie”. The name put me off though, I’d gone off the English. My first thought was “Fuck everything old and English right now.” And for someone obsessed by the history of England, this thought was rather a departure from the norm.

The pie man won me over though, in a way guaranteed to work. He told me the pie was made to Mrs Beeton’s pork pie recipe and it was quite peppery too. A vintage recipe – well, for all my fury, I can’t resist those. And he was right, it was slightly spicy with cayenne pepper and it was easily the most delicious pork pie I’ve ever had.

 

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I’ve never considered “Mrs Beeton” to be market of quality, necessarily. She was no cook herself, mostly compiling her recipes from other sources. But this is a good one.

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We’re still adrift in uncertain waters. The lead rats have jumped ship so they can shout safety at a distance, telling us what should happen now and inevitably to criticise those who are doing the actual hard work that lies ahead of us now. The brass neck of Boris Johnson, laying into Number 10 for not having a plan (yes, they should have had – but so bloody well should he). The gall of Farage to take the European money to line his inactive MEP pockets while making a complete ass of himself (and us) in front of the EU Parliament, putting his ego before the good of his country, yet again. The discomforting danger of Gove, a man who clearly thinks everyone else is his intellectual inferior, and would lead us into some very dark alleys by thinking he knows everything better than anyone.

There’s the hope (getting fainter with every step of the Tory leadership manoeuvres) that maybe, just maybe, the whole thing won’t come off at all. And the hope that Labour will get a grip soon and give the Tories a long overdue bloody nose for what they’ve done.

I’m reading everything, but I don’t know what to do for the best. So I’ve had a necklace made, as a kind of thought bubble I can wear.

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And I’ve made a meme, with the help of my husband’s ace design skills. This sums everything up for me right now.
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But I just can’t see how things will get better from a Brexit. I can’t see one positive thing right now. There’s what appears to be the likelihood of an imminent recession and then the gradual eroding of workers rights, which the Tories will of course attempt to get away with, without that pesky EU legislation holding them back. I suppose we have to wait and see. And there’s going be to no end of fighting back needed.

Categories
Food & Drink Victorian

Vintage Recipe – British Champagne, 1855

The EU referendum campaign is hotting up ahead of the vote next week. I am a Remainer, very definitely, with a side order of “Oh crap….I think we’re actually going to leave.”

So here’s my generous offering to the Brexiteers – some appropriate booze for Farage, Gove and our new gurning overlord, Boris Johnson, to get their gruesome mugs around, should the country vote leave next Thursday. British Champagne from 1855, the days of the Empire, and made from gooseberries – appropriately enough for a country that wants to turn itself into an international gooseberry.

Huddersfield Chronicle, 11th August 1855
Huddersfield Chronicle, 11th August 1855

British Champagne

Take gooseberries before they are ripe, crush them in a wooden bowl with a mallet, and to every gallon of fruit put a gallon of water; let it stand two days, stirring it well; squeeze the mixture well with the hands through a hop-sieve, then measure the liquor, and to every gallon put three pounds of load sugar; mix it well in the tub, and let it stand one day; put bottle of the best brandy into the cask, which leave open five or six weeks, taking off the scum as it rises; then close it up, and let it stand one year in the barrel before it is bottled.