Food History

I’m still not well. I’ve finally taken a deep breath and said “I can’t do all the work I want to do this week – so let me prioritise.” All the rest of this week will be what I like to think of as invalid food, though as food it’s entirely valid.

Today I’m giving you a link to a patent from 1930 (because we haven’t even begun to explore patents as a source of food history yet) and a bit about food and invalids. If any of you feel energetic, you can drop in and practise these fine principles on me.

This is from the Boston school of cookery. Fanny Farmer and her following. This particular volume is by Mary Johnson Lincoln and was originally published (as far as I can determine with the amount of effort I’m capable of today) 1909.

The advice on food for invalids is interesting. It reminds me of my doctor telling me when I’ve a virus to stay warm, drink plenty of fluids, take pain relievers and rest. I’m especially good at the not-resting bit.
“… when we are ill, sometimes we do not need any food for a time, as it is better for the system to have a period of complete rest or comparative inaction. At other times, we need only a small quantity of food, just enough to satisfy hunger; but that little must be food that can be digested easily, or that will reduce inflammation and quench thirst but will not stimulate. Food in a liquid form is quickly absorbed into the system. Mucilaginous, acid, and aromatic drinks, oranges, grapes, and other fruits, gelatinous broths and jellies, and starchy gruels are useful at such times.”

Today is more announcements. It was going to be invalid cookery, but I’m still too sick to look up recipes. My eyes just don’t seem to want to work without vast effort*.

On the technical front, we have news from 451 Press. All that amazing new equipment is being installed during the next week or so. This may mean that Food History will have some downtime for as long as the installation lasts**. Just think of it as the natural outcome of me being grumpy (which it isn’t, but it makes a good line) and come back later.

When everything’s fully back to normal, I have postcards to give away. Also maybe a book. And I promise to stop whingeing.

*To tell the truth, I’m less sick than yesterday, but a sinus headache has caught up with me and is telling me in no uncertain terms that books are not part of my day. As a result I’m complaining about everything and everyone to anyone who’s not quick enough to run and hide. How can I not read!! (Also, please forgive any typos till my eyesight is back to normal – which will be when the headache has sorted itself out.) Anyway, I’m totally not nice to be round today, so that your lucky stars I can’t check out recipes, because there’s some really ugly cooking for invalids out there and I bet I would have given you those recipes because they reflect how I feel.

** Let me make it clear I’m talking about processes, not art displays.

I’m a bit invalidish today (which is a great improvement on yesterday, when I was quite unwell) so I thought it might be a good occasion to think about some of the theory behind food we give to invalids.

I was looking up food that one gives to an adult with eczema, and the current suggestions include foods that are a bit acidic and/or have a high level of happy flora for the stomach. This rests on a basis of modern medicine compiled with observation of patients.

Now, the observation of what foods help sick people heal is something you find in most cultures. People like to inform me (I love it when kind individuals give me gratuitous pseudo-historical information – it makes it very easy for me to create straw dummies to knock down in blog posts) that medical experts in earlier periods of history didn’t use observation as a medical research technique.

There are non-observers in many cultures and periods and there are close observers in many cultures and periods: just because a culture isn’t modern doesn’t make its inhabitants incapable of thinking. So, having settled that important element with the least amount of tact (well, I hurt – and I lost my tact along the way, to boot), let me point to the most important element of this: it’s the medicinal theory that differs from place to place and time to time. It’s also the cultural practices of eating and cooking, the foodways and how people generally regard food as fitting in with health.

I might find you some historical recipes for invalid food for later in the week. If you feel like sending me some, maybe it will help. Or maybe just complaining a lot (kids do it “Mummy! I feel sick!”) will solve everything. How on earth did you guess I rang my mother today and told her every single symptom I own? And that we talked about whether or not I should beating goat curry while I feel so very … robust?

PS The moustache cup obviously carries beef tea today.

Today I have a book about Aussie foodways for you to meet. It’s called Tucker Track: the curious history of food in Australia by Warren Fahey. It’s a folkloric approach, which makes it easy reading, and it also means that it’s close to the kind of way I like to think about the past. Everything fits together in my world, and if I haven’t found out how they link together then I don’t know nearly enough about the subject.

Fahey looks at ingredients (from meat and veggies to bush tucker) but he also looks at how dinner is served, what home cooking is all about, grace and iconic foods. (I’m cheating madly here and running my eye down the table of contents.)

This is one of those books I can’t give you a quick opinion on. I would need to sit down and spend some time with it first. I do like his approach, though, and the range of subjects his book encompasses. Fahey says that the book is “about us as a community, both an Australian and international community.” He’s talking about links. Ties that bind. Food that helps establish where we fit and how we fit. Links.

I like it that, from the very beginning, he’s aware that he’s writing in time. He calls his book “a time capsule” and recognizes quite clearly that the world is changing even as he writes and that the changes from the First Fleet till now are not the only changes, ever. So many folklore people keep an underlying theme of permanence in the work – I much prefer it if the change is acknowledged and understood, and time is appreciated as an important aspect of culture. The book is worth reading just for this.

The sort of things you expect to find are there, like a quick study of the values imbued in terms such as “born with a silver spoon” and “a dog’s breakfast.” (This makes me wonder how people who are born with silver spoons in their mouths avoid becoming dig’s breakfasts, but really, that is a frivolous concern and I shall rise above it.)

He also includes enough theory for the casual reader to make sense of things, plus a nice range of topics and ingredients.

I’ll return to this book again, I think. Not soon, but one day.

This is the year of the eleciton is so many countries. Some elections are good, some are bizarre, some are tragic. Women’s suffrage, though, is always good, so I got these recipes from a US women’s suffrage cookbook. In fact, they’re from the 2nd edition of The Woman Suffrage Cook Book, by Mrs. Hattie A. Burr, 1890.

Tea Biscuits
One quart flour, one-half cup butter and lard mixed, two teaspoons baking powder, one teaspoon salt and two of sugar. Use enough sweet milk to make the usual biscuit dough; then knead just as you do yeast bread and set away for four or five hours in a cool place. Roll out and bake.
MRS. W. L. THOMPSON, Seattle.

Biscuit
Pint of flour, heaping teaspoon baking powder, work in tablespoon of cotosuet or butter. Mix with sweet milk as soft as can be handled. Roll out and bake in very hot oven.
This is an excellent recipe for shortcake if you double the amount of shortening.
MRS. HELEN J. BERRY, Bellingham.

Sour Milk Biscuit
One cup milk (sour), one-third teaspoon soda, two tablespoons melted lard, one teaspoon baking powder in the flour.
Mix with a spoon and roll out. This makes them much lighter than with soda alone and will not be yellow.
MRS. CHAS. HARRIS, Bellingham.

Beaten Biscuit
Mix one quart of flour with one iron spoon or two tablespoons of lard and one full teaspoon of salt. Make into a stiff dough with ice water. Work on a kneader or beat with a mallet until smooth and glossy. Roll, cut into shape, pierce with a fork and bake about twenty or twenty-five minutes.
MRS. LOUISA BERRY, Lexington, Ky.

Cookie, No. 1
Four cups of flour, one cup of butter, one and one-half cups sugar, four eggs, two heaping teaspoons baking powder, three tablespoons milk, lemon and nutmeg. Rub butter and flour together, add sugar, beaten eggs, milk and flavoring.

Cookies, No. 2
Two cups sugar, one full cup butter, one cup buttermilk, two eggs, one teaspoon soda, vanilla, flour to stiffen.
MRS. B. R. McCLELLAND, Olympia.

Soda Scones
Ingredients.
2 lbs. flour.
1 1/2 pints fresh milk or water.
2 dessertspoonfuls baking powder.
1/2 teaspoonful carbonate of soda.
1 teaspoonful salt.

Method: Mix together the flour, salt, baking powder and carbonate of soda. Add the milk or water gradually until sufficient to make a light dough. Handle it as little as
possible, and roll out into a large round cake. Mark it deeply into four, brush over with egg, prick with a fork, and place in a hot oven as soon as possible. Time, twenty minutes.

Cookies
One-half pound flour, one-third pound butter, one-half pound sugar, one whole egg, one yolk, grated rind of one lemon, one tablespoonful sweet cream, small cup finely cut almonds. Chop the ingredients together in chopping bowl, not mixing with the hands. When blended turn out on board and roll about one-quarter inch thick and bake.

My life is entirely void of food history insights. Maybe I should be a bit more accurate and say that my day is actually devoid of such things. My life is still more than a little bit oriented towards food history.

My usual way of dealing with thinking about other matters or being over-busy or way too stressed is to find some really interesting recipes and subtly place them instead of a post. I have bunches prepared in the background for such eventualities. The thing is, though, that after the long break you had when the server was out of operation, you don’t need an excuse for a post. You need something with a bit more bite.

One of the things that I see very often in pop history books and one of the things that I use a lot in teaching are the cool stories. Often they’re cool stories about cool people. The ideal cool stories have some intrinsic humour or some intrinsic gross-out factor. My favourite cool stories recently have been the Franklin Expedition and the Molasses Factory Accident.

John Scalzi is the cause of a minor food history incident. He has kindly traced its progress through internetland over the time since he taped bacon onto his cat, and today he points out just how it has affected his blog. Go read his blog and trace the bacon-cat story back to its inception and you can see how foodlore can develop and how it can entirely eclipse otherwise significant items in a life.

This is an extended version (become more extended because of changes in how we get our information) of local foodways and family stories. The tens of thousands of people who know about John’s cat are the equivalent of the town full of people who would have known about it three hundred years ago. Dissemination of foodways depends very much on who talks to whom and how.

So, that was your food history theory of the day – now go and mess with Scalzi’s brain. Tell him you’re using him as an example of how foodways are created and shared. I dare you.

PS There is no bacon picture on this post: I’m Jewish. Instead, I give you the moustache cup.

Today I have a little announcement. I seem to have lots of announcements right now. If I could plan my life better then I would make them all at once, as organized people do, but interesting things happen to me a dribble at a time, so my announcements come out in drabs.

Have you ever wanted to ask me questions, live? Meet me, keyboard to keyboard, online? You can. You can also run and hide. It’s your choice.

The organisers of Conflux (in their infinite wisdom) have decided that this year there will be another virtual conference two months before the main event. This shall be called the Conflux Minicon and will take place on the amazing and everywhere WWW.

I don’t know if I told you that I was invited to be a guest of honour* at Conflux proper (you know, the one in October, the one we’ve been doing all that banquet testing for) but if I haven’t, well, I guess I’ve caught you up on things. This means I’m also a guest at the Minicon, which is way more interesting for folks who can’t get to Canberra in October.

I’d be very happy to have food and history (and even food history) questions during my hour of truth. I’d also love to have some company, given I’m possibly the least-known writer of the whole weekend. You can find more complete details (including a very impressive list of other guests here.

* What’s really strange is that I’m on the organising committee (a tiny slice of infinite wisdom, that’s me). I skipped a meeting and they decided to invite me as a guest of honour. Best meeting I ever skipped!

I nearly forgot today’s post. I had an unexpected request for a short story for an anthology.

Notice how very casually I threw that statement in – it’s actually my first unexpected request of that sort and it means that at least one publisher trusts me rather a lot. Anyhow, I wrote the story and I discussed it with the publisher and it has been accepted subject to not-very-big edits, all of which I agreed were essential. All this since Friday, but most of it since about lunchtime yesterday. I’ve even done the first round of edits already. You can see why I almost forgot to post.

I still have some questions to answer from a few weeks ago. I haven’t forgotten. I think my life is running on strange timelines right now – things don’t get forgotten (much) but they do appear unexpectedly and at odd moments.

The unexpected today is a totally gorgeous cookbook. I have so many recipes with scraps of papers reminding me that I need to cook them that it’s almost impossible to open the book safely. A frenzy of notes will hit me in the face and suffocate me if I don’t open it with extreme care.

As cookbooks go, it’s not that big. Less than 200 pages, in fact. And as cookbooks go, it has a fair number of recipes, but not a vast number. It’s the quality of the recipes that count and the particular interest of their cultural background.

The book is Rivka Goldman’s Mama Nazima’s Jewish-Iraqi Cuisine. I wish it was much longer with way more detail, because what it says about that particular Jewish culture and set of foodways has left me hungry for more. My mouth waters every page. I want to go out instantly and buy a chicken and stuff it with meat (except it’s midnight and zero degrees and I am going to be strong and restrain myself). I want to make her stuffed quince, too. In fact, I can do that for my Friday night dinner – all I need to buy are pine-nuts and raisins.

Do you know the lovely thing about working so hard on one thing that I forgot another? I get to dream of Mama Nazima’s recipes all night. This is a good thing, as my story was a horror story and last night I spooked myself so entirely that I couldn’t get to sleep till 3 am.

On my way to bed I shall detour via the kitchen, I think, and tell the quinces they are going to get stuffed.

At last, the end is near…

We tasted twelve drinks. I have to remind myself of this because it all seems rather fuzzy now. After all, I have been home five hours.

All of the drinks were the best of the best of the earlier tests. Every single one of them was loved by one or more of you. I talked the Conflux committee into testing them at the end of today’s meeting, because I wanted even more tastebuds involved. We now, therefore, have our drinks lists. Ta da!! Well, we have the drinks. The names are another issue entirely.

I’m going to give you the draft names for all twelve, just because I can. The only ones we need to find permanent names for are the ones that are in the second list. The first list weren’t liked enough, or, in one case, weren’t liked by anyone at all.

So, the not-quite-as good drinks and the names we thought up in our wit-of-the-afternoon (aided by drink):

1. Rocket cocktail or Ming the Merciless Cocktail (this is where Nicole said I was drunk – and we were only 2 cocktails into the testing. Or was it three? We didn’t actually test in order.)

2. Conjured Julep (which was actually really pleasant, just not the magic of the other julep – it made me think of the clever student at school, eclipsed by the sparkly but lazy student. Or something. It definitely made me think of something.)

3. Ultra Icky Dry Cocktail (if we had used a camera today, this is when the pictures would have been worthwhile: a row of puckered mouths.)

4. Steampunk orange cocktail or Clockwork orange cocktail (the names are great, but the Curacao was too dominant, alas.)

5. Witches’ brawl punch or Forgotten lands punch or Barsoom Brawl punch (we all fell in love with ingredients, but alas only one of us liked it and even he said that this was a drink for consenting adults only)

Now for the list of cocktails we actually want to see at Conflux in October. I would really love your comments on the names, since I’m going to have to finalise the list in the next few days. I especially need help deciding between the alternatives or maybe even rising above them and finding more exact names. I’ll try to give you some tasting notes for each, to help.

1. Roswell Abduction or Gernsbackian Dream. (rather like a martini, but not as strong)

2. Stardust smash or Elven smash (a gentle taste – bland to some tasters, very pleasant, the “Killing me softly” drink)

3. Venusian sour (fresh flavour, sweet and just a little acidic, with strawberries)

4. Vampiric dreaming (Lovecraftian special) or Vampire lust (the brown of old blood, but rich and sweet and delectable in a mulled wine kind of way)

5. Southern Nights julep (the nicest champagne julep I have ever had)

6. Fremen cocktail or Apollo Tang cocktail (elegant, aroma of oranges and lemons, the perfect pre-dinner drink)

7. Stardust cobbler or New York, New York cobbler (everyone’s dream drink – and we were so busy dreaming about it that we didn’t have any decent ideas for names. Strawberries and pineapple and dangerously tempting – please suggest names for this one!)

And that’s it. I need help deciding between alternate names and help replacing some names with better ones. All the names need to reflect science fiction, fantasy or horror.

If your name gets selected, I’ll post you a special treat.

Continuing from the last post….

These are not the carefully annotated thoughts on balances of flavour and etc: they’re the funny stuff. They would have been even funnier if I had worked through the papers immediately I came home, but that was round dinner time, so I’m very sorry if this is not as amusing as the earlier tests. You have a sober scribe who is working through the test sheets in strictly rational order. Sorry about that.

One of my victims wrote at the top of his page “Obviously I needed a few drinks before I could come up with comments” – he must have noticed that the comments started halfway down. Of those comments, my favourite must be “floor cleaner complete with mint” and no, we won’t be serving this cocktail. All his other comments concern the balance of flavours and who might like them.

The next page has very few comments, but two of them are important. One concerns the cocktail everyone hated and she said simply “yuck!!!!” and the other was a request for a port free or alcohol free version of everyone’s top cocktail. I’ll do some thinking and see if I can come up with a non-alcoholic version, because that would give children and no-drinkers a bit more excitement. Only I won’t do it tonight.

Tester three was Nicole, who chaired Conflux last year. I have to identify her because she needs to be made to admit that she was the one who wrote “Apart from the fact that Gillian was already drunk and didn’t strain the ice so it was actually an alcoholic slurpee, it was nice.” She also drew very pretty pictures in the margins when she caught up with me, alcohol-wise.

Sheet four is in my handwriting. This doesn’t mean I can read it. I noted about one of the cocktails (that we won’t be serving, again) that you could light your breath from it. I noted against the universal favourite “We had seconds.” That’s a lie, though, because there had just been an exodus of child-picking-up committee members so we actually had thirds. They were fabulous, too.

Sheet five is obviously by a New Zealander, because the first comment reads “Goes well with chocolate fish (but then, doesn’t everything?).” This is a really good place to thank Ross for bringing us the chocolate fish last time he was in town. Everyone loved them. Mind you, this committee member didn’t love every cocktail. “Too granular to serve as effective flying-car fuel, but not bad.” Ought I ask him when he started drinking flying-car fuel?

There are a couple of sheets full of useful stuff (which I’ve duly made use of) but nothing funny. This leaves us with the notes of the conversation we made about the cocktails but which we forgot to write down because we were just a tad tiddly. Twelve cocktails in an afternoon will get you that way, even if you have them in tiny Chinese teacups. Most of them were again, seriously useful comments, but there was just one cocktail that merited the note “Killing me softly at the Speakeasy.” We all drank it as if it were fruit juice and then we asked about the alcohol content and then we tried to stand up.

I meant to do an analysis of whether SF or fantasy writers, short story writers or novelist had better tolerance of alcohol, but it entirely slipped my mind. It was a very worthwhile end to a committee meeting, though. The non-drinkers found it as much fun as the rest of us.

Next post – help me choose the names of our drinks!!

Today, I got drunk. The rest of the committee got more or less drunk, depending on how many were driving and whether they had to pick up children after the meeting. In fact, only two of us made it all the way through the twelve drinks that needed testing – I feel as if I’ve achieved something. I’m just not quite sure what that something is.

Anyhow, I’m sober again, which I need to be to interpret all our results. I thought that would be the end of it, but I need some help from as many of you as care to assist. I need help making the choices about names. Some of the drinks had obvious names and others … didn’t.

As well as naming drinks and scoring drinks, we had scribes and drunken scribes and one sober committee member who made notes about the things we didn’t think we were saying.

I have lots to report, in other words.

I’ll make this post a general report, I think, then I’ll give you the best of the comments in another post and then I’ll give you the names everyone has suggested and ask your opinions. One post with all of this would be just a bit much.

There was total agreement on the best three drinks and whether they should be offered before the Banquet or during the Speakeasy the next night. There was also total agreement on the cocktail at the bottom of the list: someone proposed a name for it “Ultra Dry Icky Cocktail.” With the middle bracket, I chose the ones with the highest average scores that balanced the best cocktails. We didn’t need 2 juleps on the one menu, for instance.

There was one drink that kind of invented itself due to problems with finding a particular ingredient. It was so very, very yummy that we’ve kept the changed version. Everything else is as authentic as we can get without spending vast sums of money in a land and time so removed from the original.

I think I’ve got it right. I hope I’ve got it right. I’m not a big drinker, you see (I made liqueurs rather than drinking, which is a sad thing to admit).

I am so not a drinker that I started becoming entirely besotted with coffee today. Don’t confuse this with the quality of drinks that everyone has put together for Conflux. They will be good, very good. And if I don’t drink for the next three months, I’ll enjoy them as well.

Watch this space for the other reports. Don’t watch this space for recipes until October, though. I promise – all the recipes will be up in October.

This week I’m trying some experiments with heart and goat mince. Not together, you understand. And also not historical.

The ‘not historical’ in important. Too often people tell me that they cooked something medieval or they created a great peasant stew from the nineteenth century. Ask a couple of questions and I discover that any older-sounding ingredient must be Medieval and any stew with no recipe has absolutely to be nineteenth century peasant. I wish I knew what to say at that point in a conversation. I used to probe further for sources, but now I stutter and um and ah and hope that the well-intentioned cook is joking. Invariably, they’re not. I need a special etiquette for handling these situations, I suspect. I need the same set of instructions for when entirely nice people tell me with great sincerity that they have a deep understanding of the Medieval Arthur because they have read Mists of Avalon three times. I need an entirely better system for dealing with those who believe that Druids were round in thirteenth century England.

You can see how easily led astray I am when I worry about people not understanding the difference between what actually happened in a period and the popular understand of what might have happened in a period. Today that means that lots of people probably made interesting historical dishes in various places and times, using goat’s meat or using lamb’s heart. I’m not making any of them this week. I’m looking at modern recipes and thinking about how to adapt them and then producing something entirely unexpected. It’s a great deal of fun, but it’s not historical cooking.

This is the last post for the first round of tests. The final round (where we taste all the best and chose the best of the best) is on Sunday. After Sunday, we’re in the home stretch and I can stop causing inebriation in everyone around me.

This bunch of tests is all by Sharyn. I just hope she didn’t try them in a three hour period. The names of the drinks have been changed, of course.

“Because someone had to do it, and my dipsomaniac alter ego was most disgruntled that I hadn’t volunteered sooner, I decided to test some of the drinks Gillian needed tested for the Prohibition Banquet.

Generally I like sweet drinks, and I adore mint, so I started with the Drink 1. The combination of sugar, bruised mint, ice and sparkling wine (I used Brown Bros Zibbibo) was wonderful. It was a refreshing drink, definitely a cocktail I’ll be serving at Christmas.

Next I made the Drink 2, another new favourite with its iced and sweetened champagne with twists of lemon and orange peel to give a light citrus flavour, this cocktail reminded me slightly of the white wine spritzers of the 80s. But using a quality wine, this was a nice reminder.

I decided to take a break from the champagne drinks, and made myself a Drink 3. I was disappointed in this one, as a bourbon drinker I was expecting to like this one. Unfortunately the combination of lime and bourbon didn’t sit well with me.

So I played it safe for my final drink of the evening, and had a Drink 4. I wasn’t overly entranced by the Californian wine I’d bought to try with this drink, but the drink wasn’t too bad at all, reminding me of a Mimosa cocktail. Realising I wouldn’t be drinking the rest of the wine, I used it in a tomato and basil pasta sauce, so all in all, a good night’s testing.

The following night I started with a Drink 5. I wasn’t expecting to like this one, but found it quite nice. Not a favourite, but definitely passable.

If you like vermouth, the Drink 6 was very more-ish, I could see that drink being a source of some very sore heads. It reminded me of the Mindbender cocktails served at our local wine bar in the early 80s. I liked it a great deal.

I finished my testing with a Drink 7. Pineapple and sherry combines far better than you might expect. I’d happily have this again, and as a bonus I got to make a sherry trifle for dessert.

So that’s my verdict on the cocktail recipes, one disappointment, one wine I wasn’t overly rapt in, several passable drinks and some stand outs I’ll be adding to future celebration feasts.”

Thank you Sharyn, and everyone else who tested first round drinks. We have twelve drinks for Sunday (with a possible replacement champagne drink if none of the ones we have work out).

I have a thing about the South. By the South, I mean Melbourne, of course (since I’m Australian) but I also mean states like Arkansas and Alabama.

One of my recent purchases is a book by Mrs. Fisher, first published in 1881. She started life a slave in Alabama and, a bit later, moved from Mobile to San Francisco. The little mauve (lavender? purple?) volume put out by Applewood Books in 1995 takes Mrs Fisher’s cookbook from 1881, gives it an introduction by leading food historian Karen Hess and is full of surprises.

It’s called “What Mrs. Fisher knows about Old Southern Cooking” and it contains a wide range of recipes. It’s not the same sort of cooking as, for instance, the plantation style of cookery, though it has a few recipes in common. It feels to this white on-American as a bridge between several cooking styles.

This tells us a bunch of stuff about Mrs. Fisher. First and foremost, she could cook. Not just what her mother taught her, but what people wanted to eat. If you live your life in a small community or are surrounded by people just like you, then this means something quite different to what it means in Mrs. Fisher’s case. She obviously did well in San Francisco and did well by finding the bits of Southern cooking that would appeal to the West Coast palate. This shows that she was culturally sensitive as well and enjoying her own heritage.

I’ve bookmarked two recipes. One is for one of my friends, because quinces are just in season here and she loves cooking with quinces. I’ll make sure she gets to see Mrs. Fisher’s Quince Preserves.

The other recipe is for you. I’ve wanted a 19th century recipe for Chow Chow for ages, and I’m feeling supremely generous, so I’m going to share it with you.

Chow Chow

Take one cabbage, a large one, and cut up fine. Put in a large jar or keg, and sprinkle over it thickly one pint of coarse salt. Let it remain in salt twelve hours, then scald the cut-up cabbage with one gallon of boiling vinegar. Cut up two gallons of cucumbers, green or pickled, and add to it; cut in pieces the size of the end of little finger. Then chop very fine two gallons more of cucumbers or pickles and add to the above.
Seasonings: One pound of brown sugar, one tablespoonful of cayenne pepper, one tablespoonful of black pepper, two gallons of pure wine vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of tumerick, six onions, chopped fine or grated. Then put it on to cook in a large porcelain kettle, with a slow fire, for twelve hours. Stir it occasionally to keep it from burning. You can add more pepper than is here given if you like it hot.

The quickness of the Conflux webmaster’s hand oft deceives the eye. The form to book the Conflux banquet is already up! I don’t need to email it to anyone. I can go back to my aim-of-the-week, which is to be the world’s laziest person.