Gutenberg, Myrtle and I

I can only find two pictures of Myrtle Reed, this is one of them. Not that it is that important to know what she looked like — or when and where she was born. It’s her books that I’m interested in — I’ve read some of her novels, but I didn’t know, until recently that she also wrote cook books.

“The Myrtle Reed Cook Book” was released some weeks ago, and I immediately got lost in it. There is one chapter called ”Raised Breakfast Rolls”, where I found these Swedish Rolls:

Use any plain roll mixture. When shaping for the last rising, roll the dough very thin, spread with softened butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, and add a few cleaned currants, bits of citron, and stoned raisins. Roll the dough like jelly cake, cut in half-inch slices from the ends, arrange flat in a well-buttered pan, let rise until double in bulk, and bake as usual.

My interest in food and recipes is more theoretical than practical, so I doubt I’ll try those rolls. But there is actually one recipe I’ve already tried. I’d never heard of chestnut salads, so I had to try that:

Mix boiled chestnuts with bananas and oranges, or English walnuts with cheese and celery, or with apples and figs, or with cream cheese and figs, or pecans with apples, celery, and cream cheese. Serve with French dressing made with wine or lemon-juice or with Mayonnaise made without mustard and whitened with whipped cream.

I roasted my chestnuts and mixed them with an apple, some celery and walnuts. Mayonnaise sounded too rich so I made an ordinary vinaigrette. It didn’t look very appealing, but I found it delicious.

Comfort book(s)

"Ten cents a bunch"

I don’t think I was meant to live a modern life with computers, cameras and cars. Not that I dislike those things — it’s rather the other way around, they dislike me. The computer I like to use is indisposed — nothing serious (I hope) but I don’t have the much needed energy to tackle the problems, so I’ve simply put the computer out of sight and mind. In the meantime I’m using another computer, a tiny thing where my fingers get lost and where I don’t have half of the information I gathered during the years. What I miss most is my e-mail account — if you intend to write me (yes do!) you have to use the yahoo address that you find somewhere to the right here!

So while I wait for everybody to write me, the computer to miraculously heal and my energy to return, I roam around at Gutenberg. Choosing easily chewed books.

For the moment I’m reading ”Hope Benham” from 1864 by Nora Perry.

Hope has such a noble character — but is still likable — she is intelligent and well educated, although she comes from a rather poor family.

Mr. Benham's salary was only fifteen hundred dollars a year, and it took every cent of this to keep up that simple little home…

(What cost $1500 in 1894 would cost $37307.24 in 2010.)

The author is pointing out, several times, how unimportant class is. Maybe it wasn’t as uncontroversial in 1864, as it is today.

He did not think that the poor were always in the right, and the rich always in the wrong in their relations with each other, as a good many working-people do. No; he was too intelligent for that. But what he did think, what he knew was, that the rich were not hampered and hindered by the daily struggle for existence, for the means to procure food and clothing and shelter from week to week. He knew that his own abilities were hindered and hampered by the necessity that compelled him to work almost incessantly for the necessaries of life.

Mr. Benham, Hope’s father, managed, through hard work earn quite a lot of money and is able to send Hope to a good boarding school. It is fascinating to read about the school’s New Years party:

…which, according to Kate Van der Berg, was the best fun of the year.

"But what do you do, what is the fun?" inquired Dolly Dering, who was present when Kate made the above statement.

"What do we do?" answered Kate. "Well, in the first place, on New Year's eve, we have a jolly little party of just ourselves,—we girls in the house, none of the outside girls, the day pupils,—and we play games, sing songs, tell stories, do anything, in fact, that we want to do, and at half-past ten there is a little light supper served, such as ices, and the most delicious frosted sponge-cakes, and seed-cakes, and then there is bread and butter, and hot cocoa for those that want it. After this we feel as fresh and rested as possible, and all ready to sit the old year out and the new year in."

"Oh, you don't do that?" cried Dolly, delightedly, for to sit up late was one of her ideas of happiness.

"We do just that"

"Well, and then?"

"Then," went on Kate, laughing, "we begin to grow a little quieter. We tell stories in lower voices; we watch the clock, and as it strikes twelve, we jump to our feet and all break out singing a New Year's song or hymn. Sometimes it is one thing and sometimes it is another. Last year it was Tennyson's

"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky:

The year is dying; let him die."

I’m not so sure that fifteen year old girls of today would call that ”the best fun of the year”.

I meant to tell you of other books I’ve read, but I’m afraid I became a bit too verbose here — so I’ll be back another day to let you know what other edifying books I’ve read.

To garden or not to garden

The formal garden, with its insistence

on strong bounding lines, is, strictly

speaking, the only "garden" possible.

..... .—R. F. Blomfield

We've had our first frost with -2°C, but I haven't been out yet, to see what might have survived. The pictures are from yesterday, when the we woke to a cold morning, but no real frost.

The axiom on which landscape gardening rests is declared by Messrs. Blomfield and Thomas to be

Whatever Nature does is right; therefore let us go and copy her (p. 5).

The horticulturist and the gardener are indispensable, but they should work under control, and they stand in the same relation to the designer as the artist's colourman does to the painter, or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, as the builder and his workmen stand to the architect.

The remarks quoted below on Nature and the clipping shears are not from Josh Billings, but from The Formal Garden, of which the literary merit, we are told in the preface, belongs to Mr. Blomfield.

A clipped Yew tree is as much a part of Nature—that is, subject to natural laws—as a forest Oak; but the landscapist, by appealing to associations which surround the personification of Nature, holds up the clipped Yew tree to obloquy as something against Nature. So far as that goes, it is no more unnatural to clip a Yew tree than to cut Grass.

"An unerring perception told the Greeks that the beautiful must also be the true, and recalled them back into the way. As in conduct they insisted on an energy which was rational, so in art and in literature they required of beauty that it, too, should be before all things rational."—Professor Butcher, in Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.

As always on Saturdays I spent a good part of yesterday with Gutenberg. Today, after seeing my photos, I can't resist to show you what a garden might look like — if you're bank account is more substantial than mine, and you have a gardener with a cadre of workers.

The book "Garden Design and Architects' Gardens" is from 1892 and written by W. Robinson m. Under the title it says:

"Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them 'harmonise' with architecture is barbarous, needless, and inartistic."

Exactly what I think, even if I don't think the person who said so, had my kind of neglected garden, in mind.

Old Place, Lindfield. Picturesque garden of old English house, admitting of charming variety in its vegetation

Broadlands, Hants

Clipped trees at the Little Trianon

Saturday

Feersday and Friday

Tuesday and Wednesday

Monanday