My new book, Why Fast?: The Pros and Cons of Restrictive Eating, hits shelves on July 1 in the UK and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and August 29 in North America. It’s available for pre-sale, so reserve yourself a copy. There are also plenty of copies of my earlier book, Fermented Foods, to be had.

In the meantime, you can preview a good portion of the opening chapter of Why Fast? on Google Books right now. Give it a look! It’ll tide you over until I can manage to get another piece together for this platform.

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And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up copies of my books, Why Fast? and Fermented Foods.

Every Thursday for the past eight months or so I’ve been going to a local art center for drawing lessons. The center is in a California-style cedar house that could only be more bohemian had it a hot tub. The two rooms inside would remind most people born before 1985 of their elementary school art classes. The walls are paneled in wood and hung with pop-surrealist prints and old awareness-campaign posters warning of the dangers of everything from tobacco to abandoned fridges. Philodendra and spider plants hang from wooden beams that span the ceiling, and there are mugs filled with pencils and paintbrushes and boxes labelled “Slides” and “Carbon Copies” and old photographs stacked on shelves along the walls. The whole place smells like chalk and oil paint and the Maxwell House instant coffee our instructor sips throughout the evening sessions.

Best of all, there’s not a piece of twenty-first century technology in sight. If you call to say you’ll be missing class, you leave a message on a cassette-tape answering machine. The instructor is the oldest of the old school. He gives you a 14-by-17-inch piece of drawing paper, an ebony pencil, and some sort of ordinary object to draw — a flowerpot, say, or a coffee grinder. Render something with fidelity to the original and he gives you praise that, since it is rare, leaves you sensing that it’s honestly earned. Otherwise, he stands behind you, studies whatever you’ve drawn as he chews his mustache, and asks, “May I sit down?” On taking your seat he points out everything you’ve done incorrectly and sets you to fixing it.

It’s a wonderful exercise in concentration and discipline. And it’s fun besides. The instructor plays jazz. Halfway through the session, his wife, who’s also an instructor, circulates through the classroom with a tin of candies to bolster us for the final hour. The students are from varied backgrounds: older millennial moms seeking a respite from children and dreary remote administrative jobs; retired physicians and nurses from a nearby hospital; and a loyal group of childless Gen Xers — a teacher burnt out from the Kafkaesque inanities of the school system that employs her, a former marketing exec who quit his position before it completely destroyed his soul, as he put it, a librarian seeking refuge from a toxic workplace. All of whom are, like me, deeply disappointed and alienated by the turn life has taken. This weekly two-and-a-half-hour art class captained by a man who has little use for the Internet represents a wormhole to a more humane and interesting time.

That more humane and interesting time began in the mid-1930s. It was a golden moment in which community art centers were established in the United States. Part of the Federal Art Project (FAP), a program under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal for employing artists and promoting art appreciation among the public, the centers offered free courses on everything from drawing to metalsmithing. The FAP instituted a belief held by the man whose brainchild the initiative was. That man, Daniel S. Defenbacher, would go on to head the FAP of North Carolina. He maintained that art ennobled a nation and its citizens, helping the latter in making better decisions at home and in their workplaces and communities, and steering the former, as he put it, “in the development of civilization.” Defenbacher also understood that the United States was a vast country; Americans in many regions lacked access to art museums and courses. And, at any rate, even Americans who did have courses and museums within easy reach gained little from that advantage if they were unable to connect the art therein with their own lives. Defenbacher thus concluded that there existed a “need for leadership through a community workshop … where demonstrations of art in action may be presented” and where people may “refocus their use of art by doing as well as seeing.”

Defenbacher thought community art centers the perfect place to appreciate art by doing. He saw them as no different from the other social assistance programs deployed by the Roosevelt administration at the time. The government had established centers for “health, social welfare, and science,” he wrote, adding, “We must do the same for art.”

Establish them he did. The first FAP center opened in 1935. Located in North Carolina’s capital of Raleigh, it boasted an art gallery for exhibitions of local and national artists, a series of art-themed lectures, how-to’s on various art materials, and studio classes for adults and children. The Raleigh FAP would become the model for centers across the United States.

Defenbacher focused most of his efforts on rural towns of southern and western states, though several centers did also open in New York City. By the close of the FAP’s first year, 25 centers had opened their doors. Seven years later, centers numbered 103 in all and stood in 22 states. The Big Apple alone had, along with its goodly number of centers, some 600 extension centers housed in public schools, libraries, and settlement homes.

Classes were free for everyone, and each center catered to the interests and traditions of the local population. Centers in the rural South hosted classes on textile weaving, for example, whereas those in the West taught indigenous crafts such as wool embroidery. In Arizona, students made tile mosaics and fountains, which they used to decorate public squares and schools. Indeed, some centers specialized in local traditional handicrafts. FAP administrators feared that many such crafts and hobbies would disappear with the “machine age.” The preservation and teaching of these traditional crafts could benefit people, especially as those same machines had led to an increase in leisure time. (Little could these administrators guess that, about fifteen years later, people would fill that time not with traditional crafts, but with televised masscult inanities.)

Truly, you could learn all sorts of things at a FAP center. An especially busy center in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem taught block printing, metal crafts, painting, drawing, photography, pottery, sculpture, and weaving. Some centers came to be renowned for the quality of their courses. A center in Miami, for example, excelled in sculpture and ceramics instruction, and a center in Key West stood out for its painting courses.

The FAP centers were not only a great boon for members of the public, many of whom could study art for the first time in their lives, but also for artists, who appreciated the steady paycheck and the opportunity to share their craft. The opportunity the centers provided was especially important for artists who otherwise had little hope of substantial public support. African American artist Lawrence A. Jones is one such example. As a young man in Lynchburg, Virginia, he found it almost impossible to study art. Neither public schools nor colleges open to him offering any kind of classes in art, Jones moved to Chicago, where he found work as a waiter. In the few spare hours he enjoyed, he made art. His persistence paid off. Jones received a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied for four years. He then went to Dillard University in New Orleans where he served as an assistant in the Fine Arts department before finally securing a position with the FAP as an instructor.

Jones loved his work at the FAP center. Though he himself had had a difficult life, he said his work for the FAP gave him “a vivid realization of my responsibility toward the underprivileged.” On weekday evenings he taught adults. On Sundays, he taught “finger painting and simple crafts” to children in the poorer parts of the city. All his young students benefitted from his instruction, the “maladjusted and general rowdies” he taught perhaps gaining the most. Jones observed firsthand the change art can make in people’s lives. “Believing as I do that the appreciation of art cultivates in man a sincere regard for the contributions of his fellow men, regardless of race or creed,” he wrote, “I am trying through my own painting and art teaching to create a more democratic America.”

This more democratic America was on full display at FAP gallery shows. Here the work of art students, local artists, and children went on view. (FAP officials felt children’s art should be treated as seriously as art made by adults.) It was often an eclectic collection. Alongside drawings and paintings hung traditional handicrafts — metal craft, needlepoint, quilts, photography, and even handmade musical instruments. The only stipulation, as one administrator put it, was that “[e]ach exhibit must be explained to the visitor through his everyday experiences until there is a relationship established between art and himself.” Only then would art become, “in its various uses, a necessary part of his daily life.”

The FAP centers did become a necessary part of many Americans’ lives, realizing Defenbacher’s vision that they become as “indispensable as the public library.” In New York City, thirty thousand children and seven thousand adults were attending FAP classes in 1937. And the centers had measurable, positive effects. Areas high in crime saw rates decrease. When Bellevue Hospital initiated its own art classes, doctors saw improvement in patients with mental illness. And thousands of men and women were able to discover new talents and learn new skills. The artist had become a leader showing the way forward to a more democratic and humane society. “By means of our activities the Art Projects have been able to reach the millions,” said Massachusetts art administrator Thaddeus Clapp, and the artist “is no longer an exotic, but an individual functioning freely within a society that has a place for him, no longer in an ivory tower, but in contact with his time and his people.”

Despite this great success, falling unemployment and wartime priorities led the FAP and its centers to be shut down in 1943. About two weeks ago I found out that my own art course was canceled. And though I hope the course will resume in summer, I have reason to believe it won’t. Unfortunately, after scouring the Internet and local bulletin boards, I’ve discovered that there’s nothing else like it in my community. Which surprises me, because my drawing class was always full, and I think there must be people like me who would welcome the opportunity to make art alongside folks from different walks of life. But the last forty years have seen government and business favor policies and practices that have undermined, rather than bolstered, democracy. Only now, when the last vestiges of New Deal programs and policies have faded, do we see how absolutely impoverished life has become.

Here’s a recipe for Daffodil Cake from the 1940 community cookbook Food for the Body, Food for the Soul. It’s a cake I imagine might have been served at benefit dinners to raise money for a FAP center (the federal government paid for the teachers and administrators, but the community had to raise the funds to build the centers.)

Daffodil Cake

• 6 egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons water
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ pastry flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon vanilla
•  
• 6 egg whites
• 1 teaspoon cream of tartar
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ cup pastry flour
• ½ teaspoon vanilla
• ½ teaspoon salt

Beat egg yolks with water until it is lemon color. Add other ingredients and beat well. Place in ungreased angel food pan.

Beat egg whites until frothy. Add cream of tartar and beat until stiff. Fold in other ingredients. Pour over first part. Bake 45 minutes in slow oven.

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The history of cutlery is not as boring as you might think

About a month ago, I agreed to write book on the history of dining. (The subject is perhaps an odd one to follow my book on fasting that comes out later this year. But, hey, I’m a woman of contradictions.) And I am genuinely happy that I did. It’s a great privilege to publish a book. God knows I spent about five years suffering setbacks in that effort before my first book, Fermented Foods, became a reality. Yet another part of me feels somewhat queasy about it and asks, “Why have I done this to myself yet again?”

Because I’d like the writing of my book on dining to be less solitary, and because only a portion of what I discover ends up in print, I’ve decided to share some of my more interesting findings on this platform. Take, for example, cutlery, the subject I’m currently researching. I admit I wasn’t looking forward to drafting a chapter on such a seemingly humdrum topic. Outside of the odd collector, who cares about forks, table knives and spoons? No great event hinges on them that I can think of, no kingdom lost for want of a butter spade.

But, to my surprise, cutlery is quite interesting, in part because there was once such an overwhelming variety of it. Scroll through a scan of a nineteenth-century domestic catalog and you’ll discover a whole new world of dining utensils. Need a fork? You could choose from among pickle forks, oyster forks, steak forks, bread forks, and cold meat forks, to name just a few. Spoons likewise came in a seemingly infinite variety: berry spoons, salad spoons, olive spoons, orange spoons, nut spoons, and porridge spoons. And there were a multitude of dinner knives, too, including cake knives, ice cream knives and fish knives, not to mention miscellaneous tools such as pea servers, cheese scoops, cucumber servers, sugar sifters, and food pushers.

Indeed, for most of history people enjoyed a far more interesting array of tableware than we do today. Romans of antiquity, for example, had a spoon solely for eating eggs. It was a strange and delicate thing, much like a christening spoon; although it also had a sharp point at its end, like a skewer, so it’s probably something you wouldn’t want to use around a baby. The pointed end served for piercing an egg at its end. Once a hungry Roman pierced it, he would suck the white and yoke out of the shell through the hole. This fiddly yet indecorous technique served two purposes. First, it left the shell intact as its contents were consumed, preventing any mess. Second, it freed any demons he thought might be lurking in the egg. (Some folks even buried the intact eggshells under the floors of their homes as added insurance against meddlesome spirits.)

Then, there was the 18th-century English snuff spoon. Though not cutlery per se, this little spoon became a fixture at table with the popularity of tobacco in powdered form. Men and women took snuff whenever the craving struck. To ensure they could do so easily, they carried it in small bottles to which they affixed snuff spoons. In Ireland, for example, “the early snuff-takers did not sniff snuff by pinches,” an 1853 issue of Household Words tells us. Rather, they toasted tobacco leaves before the hearth fire, ground the leaves into a fine powder with a ram’s horn, heaped the powder on a snuff spoon, snorted it up, and dusted their noses with a rabbit’s foot that they kept with their spoon. By 1853, however, few were the men who could “inhale snuff by the spoonful.” The falloff in virility was apparently such that the author lamented, “But what can we expect in these degenerate days!”

(It may be that daring gave way to prudence. In the same issue of Household Words appears an account of a man who, after a “too copious dose of snuff,” had fallen into a “violent fit of sneezing” — of such violence, in fact, that in the midst of his “convulsive movements” he threw himself from his chair into his footbath and “so asphyxiated.”)

If snuff spoons signaled manliness, spoons for dining evoked the distaff side, owing to associations with milky porridges and puddings. Such, anyway, was the thinking of anthropologist E.A. Hammond in 1967, after analyzing the fork, knife, and spoon as sexual symbols. He concluded that “differentiation” of these utensils “is thus basically male versus female.” Hammond did qualify his conclusion by adding that “the distinctions are not absolute.” Most challenging for Hammond in this regard was the fork. He situated it in an Oedipal relation with the other utensils. The spoon was the mother, evidently owing to its defining functional feature, its bowl; and the knife, for reasons you can probably guess, the father. The fork was the son, and the familial tension between the three is suggested in place settings. “[T]he British spoon mediates between the knife and fork, and … the American knife comes between the fork and spoon, Hammond writes.

The fork was long a mischief-maker. An 11th-century Byzantine princess was supposedly cursed with plague for using one. A few hundred years later, Martin Luther saw the fork as emblematic of Catholic decadence and implored God to “preserve him” from using it. And a few hundred years after that, people were still taking a dim view of the utensil. In 1837, American etiquette writer Eliza Ware saw the fork as an affectation and suggested people feed themselves with knives alone, provided they “do it neatly.” In 1897, English sailors thought forks “unmanly” and ate their salted beef and biscuit without them. And in his 1927 novel Babylon, French Surrealist René Crevel depicts forks as homewreckers. His young protagonist creates a whole fantasy about a fork, which represents a bewitching red-headed English adventuress who ran away with her father, whom she imagines as a knife, his white flannel trousers resembling the knife’s ivory handle. “I love you so much,” the little girl has Mr. Knife say to Miss Fork. Then, he cryptically adds, “You are a whore like death…”

Knives, forks, and spoons coexist happily enough today — though they are much diminished in their variety and beauty. Who in 2023 owns and uses a berry spoon or ramekin fork? But, then again, who really needs such things? My favorite spoon is a tarnished, heavy thing, somewhere between a soup spoon and a serving spoon. Imprinted on it in tiny letters along the underside of the handle is “Germany U.S. Zone.” It’s a small reminder of large historical events, one that connects me to the strange and humbling continuum of human experience. This, to me, is decoration enough.

I leave you with a recipe for Eggs à la Bonne Femme from A Selection of Dishes and the Chef’s Reminder (1909). Eat it with whatever utensil you see fit!

Eggs à la Bonne Femme

Fry some sliced onions in butter, when tender add a spoonful of vinegar, butter a shirred egg dish, spread the bottom with the onions, break in the eggs, place in the oven till set, then pour over a spoonful of Lyonnaise sauce and serve.

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I have lived in southern New England for a while now, and it used to be that I could count on winter’s being, well, wintry. Snow fell and it stuck around. In recent years, however, the winter weather has tended to be at once monotonous and unsettled: alternately gloomy and blustery for days, wet, sometimes icy, and unseasonably warm. I’ve taken to calling it “Novembril,” this new super-season of six months’ duration that offers a tedious blend of winter and autumn. It will be followed by the yin to its yang, Maytober, which has its own dubious charms.

Anyway, I’ve been beguiling Novembril Sundays by visiting art museums. I do it to steady myself against the turn Mother Nature has taken — not to mention similar turns taken in world events and national affairs. I take great comfort in the simple fact that beautiful things were once made and people once delighted in them. And, if the crowds I’ve jostled with are any indication, I’m not the only one who does.

At some point, however, delight morphs into exhaustion. Hours of marveling at Grecian urns, admiring Dutch landscapes, and studying portraits by Sargent makes my head swim, my eyes smart, my legs ache. Art drunk, I jokingly call this enervated state. And the only thing that sobers me up is a trip to the museum coffee shop.

Oddly enough, that’s exactly the purpose coffee shops once served: to sober people up, be it from too much Titian or too much Tanqueray. It so happens that the latter was much more commonly the case. There got going in late nineteenth century Britain a great “coffee tavern” movement whose aim it was to get working stiffs to give up tumblers of gin for steaming hot cups of joe. Members of the temperance league joined with altruistic businessmen, and together they became the movement’s driving force. As one proponent of the movement crowed, it enlisted “the best brains, the warmest hearts, and the most liberal purses in the kingdom.” With this formidable combination behind them, coffee taverns sprouted up all throughout Great Britain. Some larger cities housed hundreds of them.

From these liberal purses sprang The Temple Arms, which an 1877 issue of Punch described as “crowded by customers of all the classes inhabiting that locality.” The Temple Arms sold coffee for half a penny and tea for a penny, along with “cake, bread-and-butter, and other eatables.” Yet, a visit to The Temple Arms was no grab-n’-go proposition. It’s comfortable, well-lit rooms were stocked with newspapers, periodicals, and various light reading to induce customers to tarry over a refill or two.

Other taverns offered attractions even more enticing. London’s East Finchley Coffee Tavern featured an “American bowling-alley” and a parlor for playing bagatelle, a forerunner of pinball. If pool was your game, you could head to the Coffee Tavern and Seaman’s Institute in Portsea, located in the south of England. If billiards weren’t for you, the establishment also boasted a reading room with cozy chairs and abundant literature of interest to soldiers and sailors. And, if all the coffee you downed should put an edge on your appetite, you could grab one of several meat-and-potato dishes, all of which combined “quality with cheapness.” It seems improbable that frequenters of coffee taverns could ever grow sleepy, but any who did could stay the night. The Coffee Tavern and Seaman’s Institute offered lodging in the form of small cabins outfitted with feather beds and pillows, and thick blankets. Customers averred that the arrangement made for a “regular little nest of convenience and comfort.”

The coffee taverns of London and elsewhere welcomed members of both sexes. Despite this, most British women tended to prefer establishments reserved for them only. One London coffee tavern catered to the “multitudes of shop girls and seamstresses” who otherwise had “no regular dining place.” This meant that they had but “very scanty means of getting food in the very scanty time … allowed them for getting it.” Subjected to the tempo of life in which commerce and mechanization were fully in command, these shopgirls and seamstresses looked to the tavern not only for stimulating beverages but also for nourishing fare to see them through their work shifts. The tavern happily provided them both.

Great Britain’s temperance coffee taverns found equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic. Humble carts often took the place of whole establishments in the United States, for example. These carts were run by altruistic sorts, such as Dr. John Wilberforce Kennion. A journalist turned charity worker and preacher, Kennion ran five coffee carts in Brooklyn, New York. Kennion dispensed his coffee free of charge, along with free bread, soap, and job leads. In a single year, 1888, Kennion gave away 520 gallons of coffee and 400 bars of soap. Perhaps more significantly, he found jobs for 550 men. And, for Thanksgiving of that year, he treated all who wanted to a dinner of turkey, chicken, vegetables, pie, bread, and, naturally enough, coffee — all thanks to private donors sympathetic to the good doctor’s cause.

Whether coffee truly proved a greater enticement than booze, I cannot say. I suspect, however, that it wasn’t so much the coffee and cake as the compassion that caused ordinary workers to turn away from drink and despair. I’m sure they were heartened by seeing that others took an interest in their pain and suffering. More than anything, it was the cup of human kindness that consoled them.

In honor of the coffee taverns of yesteryear, then, here’s a recipe for coffee cake from The Temperance Cook Book (1887).

Coffee Cake (No. 2)

One cupful of butter, one cupful of sugar, one cupful of molasses, one pound of raisins, one teaspoonful each of soda, cinnamon and all spice, one-half nutmeg, three eggs (it can be made with one or two eggs). Sift the soda in the molasses. Excellent.

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Of the many holiday tales out there, “Old Christmas” remains one of my favorites. Published in 1819 by the American writer Washington Irving, who, as the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” knew how to spin a captivating yarn, “Old Christmas” recounts the observations and experiences of one Geoffrey Crayon, an American gentleman abroad (and fictional stand-in for the author). His exploration of the British Isles carries Crayon to a Yorkshire inn.

There in the inn coziness reigns — a roaring fire, great tankards of ale, and rounds of cold beef to ease the hunger of any guest. Crayon has arrived on Christmas Eve, and the cheerful scene entices him to stay the night. He in fact determines to do just that. Yet, as it happens, he will not, thanks to an unexpected reunion.

The reunion begins with the arrival of a post-chaise. From the carriage steps Frank Bracebridge, “a sprightly good-humored fellow,” as Crayon characterizes him. A traveling companion of Crayon’s years before, Bracebridge enters the inn, where the two men’s eyes meet. Immediate recognition sparks delight, and soon Bracebridge plies Crayon with an offer.

Bracebridge proposes to bring Crayon home with him to Bracebridge Hall, where Crayon may join in celebration of Christmas “in something of the old-fashioned style,” as his old friend puts it. Crayon takes Bracebridge up on the offer. He steps into Bracebridge’s post-chaise, and the two onetime companions head for Bracebridge Hall.

Along the way, Bracebridge explains a certain quirk of his father’s. Known simply as “the Squire,” the elder Bracebridge takes fierce pride in belonging to one of Yorkshire’s oldest families. With the honor comes the obligation, as the Squire reckons, of “keeping up something of the old English hospitality.”

Indeed, the Squire reveres all the ancient customs and lore of his county seat. He keeps the gardens surrounding Bracebridge Hall adorned with “obsolete finery,” as the younger Bracebridge tells his coach-mate, and the halls festooned with burnished suits of armor and portraits of heroic ancestors.

Similar punctiliousness the Squire brings to yuletide observances. He insists that everyone in his household enact the rites and rituals of the holiday with utter exactitude. As master of the revels, the Squire himself sees to the exactitude by regularly consulting “old books for precedent and authority” as guides to the finer points of “merrie disport.” The regime of pleasure involves not only Bracebridges but their servants, as well. The Squire grants his servants leave to revel throughout the twelve days of Christmas, provided that they do so “comfortably to ancient usage.”

In this injunction, the household servants bear an easy yoke; “ancient usage” turns out to mean many games. Frank Bracebridge rattles off for Crayon several: “hoodman blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob apple and snapdragon” — all by the warm glow of Christmas candles and a Yule log.

Perhaps less comfortable but no less merry is the celebration in the main hall. There the squire gathers relations near and distant. They range from aged aunts and uncles and “blooming country cousins,” to “comfortably married dames,” “superannuated spinsters” and “bright-eyed boarding-school hoydens,” among other specimens of the Bracebridge clan. They likewise celebrate Christmas according to custom, chatting and playing cards and other ancient games before the Yule log, which the Squire himself lights with a brand from the previous year’s log. The flourish with which he lights the log comports to — you guessed it! — ancient fashion.

Ancient fashion dictates the holiday meals, as well. Bracebridge and Crayon arrive to Bracebridge Hall and a Christmas Eve supper of frumenty — wheat cakes boiled in richly spiced milk — and mince pie, the latter dish “an old friend,” as Crayon describes it. These delights, however, offer a mere foretaste of far more sumptuous fare on Christmas Day. Into the great hall bedecked with evergreen and lit by Yule candles that beam “like stars of the first magnitude” enters an “enormous pig’s head decorated with rosemary” and set on a silver platter. “Ancient sirloin” follows as the next dish — “ancient” reflecting, one hopes, the method of preparation rather than the freshness. A pie of pheasant completes a trio of meat. Only with this last dish does the Squire swerve from tradition: ancient authority ordains that peacock meat fill the pie. Yet the Squire cannot bring himself to slaughter the peacocks of his manor. He contents himself, rather, with plucking a few peacock feathers to adorn the crust. (Custom governing this pie’s preparation calls for a peacock’s head and gilt beak to jut forth from one end of the pie. It also calls for gravy made from “three fat wethers” and a third side of pheasant dressed in ambergris.)

Dinner guests perhaps overwhelmed by all the rich dishes could look forward to the appearance of the Wassail Bowl, the holiday vessel containing the Squire’s “richest and raciest wine.” Not content, however, to allow the richness and raciness speak for themselves, the Squire invokes tradition yet again by having nutmeg, ginger, sugar, and roasted crabapples added to his wine. Only with such garnishes does the wine, in the Squire’s estimation, become “the ancient fountain of good feeling, where all hearts meet together.”

To the most newly arrived heart meeting at the ancient fountain of good feeling, the festivities of Bracebridge Hall must have come as a revelation. The Christmas holiday in Crayon’s United States had fallen into a woeful condition. Where it wasn’t simply neglected it was outlawed, owing to a notion that it encouraged drunkenness and belligerence. And from the revelation followed an urge for restoration. Crayon’s real-world counterpart Irving found himself so moved by the joyous revelry in England that he mounted a defense of the holiday in his home country. Out must go the low impulses given scope at Christmas in the U.S. in favor of “hallow and elevated enjoyment.” Such enjoyment rests on “solemn and sacred feeling” experienced anew — feeling that “blends well with our conviviality” and that “lifts the spirit to a state” befitting it.

We today might snicker at the Squire in his obsession with preserving “ancient ways.” Certainly, not all of them merit preservation. The same Squire of Bracebridge Hall who summons his servants to merry disport also laments their having become “too knowing,” a development that has led them to “begin to read newspapers.” Yet, this unevenness on the Squire’s part should not overcloud the animating idea behind the holiday tradition he strives to uphold. The ways that attach to holidays as various as Christmas or, say, Diwali create a gentle eddy in the otherwise relentless onrush of a lived time that sweeps us from trial to trial. In this eddy we can set aside our differences and share the great good luck of being able to eat and drink our fill with family and friends.

That we might find tranquility and happiness in holidays risks becoming a quaint notion worthy of our Squire. We would do well to attend to the risk, because where we abandon the shared pleasures that have cheered us for millennia, we leave just one more void for the current moment to fill with some meager, unattractive replacement. So, whatever holiday you happen to celebrate these next few days and weeks, celebrate it well and wholly — and share your good fortune and cheer with others, if you can.

And what better way to share good fortune and cheer than with this American version of the Wassail Bowl from Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em (1937)?

Wassail Bowl

• 2 baked apples
• 2 tablespoons fine sugar
• 1 tablespoon allspice
• 1 lemon, juiced and peeled
• 1 quart hot ale
• 1 pint warm sherry

To make the Wassail Bowl bake two apples and cut in small pieces. Add the sugar, the allspice, the lemon, the heated ale, and warm sherry. Mix well, mashing with a muddler, heat and serve hot.

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And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up copies of my books, Why Fast? and Fermented Foods.

If you should ever plan a trip to utopia, you’ll want the pack your loosest clothes. The food there is fantastic — and there’s plenty of it. The land of Cockaigne, the subject of legend in Europe going back to the Middle Ages, greets visitors with streets paved with buttery pastries in place of cobblestones. In the New World, the fabled city of El Dorado, said to lie hidden in the jungles of Colombia, offers paradise for gourmands and treasure hunters alike. There fountains, if they don’t spray jets of rose water, issue great gouts of sugarcane liquor. Further north, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, which fueled the dreams of hobos throughout a depression-plagued United States, is home to lemonade springs and hens that lay hard-boiled eggs.

Travel to dystopia, on the other hand, and you’ll want to pack a lunch. There is local cuisine, of a kind. But it will make you question, whether, in a place in which life has reached its greatest potential for awfulness, the food of the place hasn’t, as well.

The answer to that question is: It depends. Whereas overwhelming abundance in utopias moots the issue of feeding the masses, in dystopias it’s an abiding concern. Food is neither cheap nor free on a planet gone pear-shaped, and it’s never plentiful — not that anyone would wish it to be. As any survey of dystopian fiction shows, food in these dreary domains is, at best, wholesome, if synthetic and tough to get. At worst, it’s synthetic, tough to get, and repulsive, to boot.

For examples of the latter, we can start with Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. In its post-apocalyptic world, people kick off their day with Choco-Nutrino, a breakfast cereal made entirely of synthetic ingredients. It came to market in response to a global collapse of the cacao crop. Lunch offers a few options: SoyOBoy burgers, which are as flavorless as they are meatless, and ChickieNobs. The latter are nuggets made with the meat of chicken genetically engineered to be an “animal protein tuber.” The altered fowl exists as a kind of “chicken hookworm,” having only a torso and a gaping mouth for receiving feed. Short on “chickie” and long on “nob,” its meat has a “bland tofu like consistency” and an “inoffensive flavor.” Though inoffensive, which is perhaps the most you could ask of it, it’s not especially healthy. Those folks for whom ChickieNobs are a staple come to have a complexion that looks like “regurgitated pizza.”

Yet maybe Atwood’s ChickieNobs would prove more tempting up against the fare in H.G. Wells’s 1899 novel of a dismal future, When the Sleeper Wakes. It’s set in London at the dawn of the 22nd century. The city and the rest of Britain is ruled by a plutocratic elite that forces the 99 percent of inferior souls to subsist on “pink fluid with a greenish fluorescence and a meaty taste.” Helping the fluid to go down easier is “chemical wine,” which blunts tastebuds and hope with equal effectiveness.

Pink equals “blah” in 1984, as well. It’s the hue of the “cubes of spongey … stuff” passed off as stew beef by the central authority of George Orwell’s 1949 novel. The pink, spongey stew usually came served with bread, coffee, and cheese of a uniform gray. So joyless is the “filthy-tasting” platter that it leads the main character, Winston Smith, to wonder, “Had food always been like this?”

The narrator of We, the 1921 novel by Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, knows that food hadn’t always. Known only as D-503, he informs readers that in his totalitarian world “petroleum food” ended mass hunger. Invented, readers learn, in the “thirty-fifth year before the foundation of the United State,” petroleum food needs to be chewed fifty times before an eater could swallow it. Those fifty meeting of molars presumably deliver little in the way of savor, for D-503 says nothing of its taste. Any idea that readers gather as to taste comes only by way of comparison. D-503 speaks of “primitive peasants” who, prior to the founding of the United State, loved bread and other non-petroleum-based foods. Unfortunately, by the time of D-503’s telling bread had fallen into oblivion, it’s very chemical composition become a mystery in the wake of petroleum food’s triumph.

Leave it to English writer Aldous Huxley to add a twist to dystopian fare. His 1932 novel Brave New World features food that isn’t so much dispiriting necessarily as blandly wholesome: “pan-glandular biscuits,” accompanied by carotene sandwiches, pâté of vitamin A, and beef-surrogates. To wash it all down there are caffeine solutions for adults; for children, “pasteurized external secretions.”

The forgoing remarks are not to say that appealing food is absent from dystopia. It does appear, albeit as means rather than an end — the means of awakening memories of a time before dystopia’s consolidation, a time in which lives were lived more freely and rewardingly. If it happens that characters have no such memories, then pleasant fare awakens them to a desire for a life in which such memories may be made. In either case, a satisfying meal stirs dystopian diners to rebellion, if it is not itself already a rebellious act.

Refection and rebellion meet in the person of Guy Montag, the central character in American writer Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451. Readers join Montag as he plies his trade of “fireman” tasked by the novel’s authoritarian powers to raise books to the titular temperature, thereby razing knowledge to the metaphorical ground. Montag tires of this pursuit, however, and the anti-intellectual environment it supports. He takes up with a band of intellectuals eking out an outlaw existence in the wilderness. One of the first meals Montag eats with them is bacon fried over a campfire, the aroma of which fills the air. The realness of it breathes freshness into life spent consuming mass entertainment “leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm.” At another point he delights in the heady aromas of the natural world, savoring the scent of something in the air that smells like a cut potato, and something “like pickles from a bottle and a smell like parsley on the table at home … a faint yellow odor like mustard from a jar.” After plucking a weed, he notes that “his fingers smelled of licorice.” Such earthy scents are connected to the essence of life, the simple things that constitute the majestic whole.

Whereas a savory or dainty speaks to Guy Montag of the part and the whole, to Winston Smith it speaks of present and past. Given a chocolate bar by his lover Julia, he finds himself transported to his youth. Julia’s gift is the real McCoy and, for that reason, unusual — dark and shiny, wrapped in silver — rather than the “dull-brown crumbly” ersatz fobbed off by Big Brother. The first whiff of the confection stirs up a memory of the old world, a memory which “he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.” Julia later brings him sugar. Winston does not recognize the “heavy, sandlike stuff” at first. Yet he knows by sight the “proper white bread” and jam she unwraps, as well as the real coffee she serves with real milk. The“rich, hot smell” of the coffee seems “like an emanation from his early childhood.”

Our hero of Huxley’s Brave New World, John Savage, takes a decidedly more vigorous approach to tasting of the past. A future London of runaway scientism sends him fleeing to the wilds beyond. There he vows to live on waterfowl and small game. To supplement the spoils of the hunt he adds wheat flour and homegrown produce. He draws the line at the synthetic and recovered-ingredient offerings of the metropolis, however. No “cotton-waste flour substitute” shall pass his lips again. (John Savage does at one point break his vow by buying some pan-glandular biscuits and vitaminized beef-surrogate, a lapse for which he later curses himself.)

Tasty, simple food, then, offers an antidote to the deadening effect of dystopia. It awakens memories and long-dormant senses. And it reconnects us with our innermost selves and the natural world. The dystopian impulse is to reduce the many worthwhile features of human existence, be they joyful or heart-rending, to a chirping monotony, be it drab or lurid, of material progress. In dystopia, the delightful, organic panoply of life lived freely is at first tainted, and later replaced, by a monolithic, synthetic order fueled by fear.

We can learn much from these novels. Between pandemic, war, inflation, corporate monopolies, a febrile climate, climbing rents and mortgages, and technologies that snoop and scold, it may be that dystopia’s hour has come round at last. We have all the more reason, then, to cherish the simple, human pleasures that remain to us — and to brace for worse things to come.

Try this simple recipe for old fashioned roast turkey from The Beloit Cook Book (1914). Guaranteed free of nobs, it’s a dish that can hearten and delight.

Old-Fashioned Roast Turkey

Wash thoroughly on the outside with warm water, soap and brush, rinse and dry. For the stuffing, use 2 baker’s loaves of 1 day old bread, crumble very fine dry, season highly with pepper and salt and molten with 1 cup melted butter. Stuff the turkey, sew up opening, truss legs and wings tightly, cover legs with oiled paper to prevent dryness. Rub over with salt and butter, dredge lightly with flour and put in hot oven for ½ hour and 1 ½ pints water in pan. Then cover, not closely, and bake moderately until tender. Then remove cover and brown.

Oyster Dressing for Turkey: One quart oysters, 1 pound oyster crackers, ½ pound butter. Salt and pepper.

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On a December evening in 1903, the streets of Ybor City, Florida rang with gunfire. Two men had dueled and, in so doing, sustained grave injuries. One of the duelists, Mexican national Enrique Velázquez, would find himself the worse for the exchange, his bullet wounds carrying him off five days later. His antagonist, Spaniard Jesús Fernández, managed to survive his injuries.

What made the two men fall out so? What insult, what dispute, inspired such passion that only a gunfight could settle, and in a year so seemingly removed from the great age of duels? In the case of Velázquez and Fernández, no woman was to blame, nor any family feud. Rather, it was a novel, Émile Zola’s La Curée, that set in motion the deadly event. The novel’s plot turns on sexual intrigue, some of it verging on incestuous. This would be scandalous enough if read privately. If read aloud, it promised to upend public decency.

Velázquez and Fernández emerged as the fieriest partisans of opinion that had divided the workers of the José Lovera Cigar Factory, where the novel was being read aloud. One camp found Zola’s novel suitable matter for general consumption. The other camp found it quite the opposite, and it pointed to the handful of women employed at the factory as the reason. The camps remained at odds over the matter until it became clear to Velázquez and Fernández, if no one else, that only guns could settle it.

Art was held in high esteem in the José Lovera. Like other cigar factories of Ybor City, which occupies the eastern part of Tampa, the José Lovera had its reader (el lector). A reader was recruited to the position by the factory hands, who tasked him to read aloud as they rolled cigar after cigar. A reader’s text varied. Novels, newspaper articles, even political tracts — all were likely to be read from in a shift. Along with a text, a reader had a pulpit of a sort: a seat elevated above the shop floor from which to be better heard.

The office of reader was born well before 1903, and in a place other that Florida’s Gulf coast. The lore goes that it was the brainchild of Saturnino Martínez, a cigar worker in Cuba (he would in time go on to be a reader himself, as well as the editor of a literary newspaper). Martínez took his inspiration from Charles Dickens, who in the 1850s toured the United States giving lectures. The practice of reading aloud during a shift made perfect sense to Martínez. Rolling cigars was a quiet activity. The only sound it made came from a chaveta, a knife for cutting tobacco leaves. And it demanded little in the way of thought from the individual engaged in it, leaving him brainpower to spare for indulging the imagination with stories and news.

The earliest readers were simply workers who knew how to read. Being tapped for reader duties by peers certainly came as an honor. Yet the honor came at a cost. The lofty reader’s perch called a successful candidate away from his job of rolling cigars, which amounted to calling him away from his wages. For the half-hour to hour that a reader read to his co-workers, he received no pay. To make up for the wages lost, listeners passed the hat among themselves. The money collected went to the reader. Sometimes the subsidy could be quite handsome, especially if a reader showed himself to have real talent.

The practice of reading aloud became an instant success in Martínez’s factory. “Spending hours listening to someone reading speeches, essays, or the chapters of a novel!,” exclaimed the editor of a Cuban newspaper of the time. “This is something better than that to which we are accustomed, and we find it irresistible.” Factory hands did grow accustomed to it in short order, however — so much so, in fact, that many workers refused to work at any cigar factory that failed to offer this perk.

The practice hardened into tradition, and the tradition migrated with the cigar industry itself from Cuba to Florida. The office of reader, meanwhile, evolved, growing ever more professionalized. The readers in these factories came to be regarded as something akin teachers or priests. The comparison was apt: The practice of having someone reading aloud to others as they performed their daily tasks had its roots in the Dark Ages, when Catholic monks listened to religious texts as they dined and nuns to spiritual works as they illustrated books, embroidered cloth, or carried out other duties. The readers of Ybor City, however, were no religious votaries; they were journalists and writers of various social and political backgrounds. And they were nearly all men. The only reader able to crack this boys’ club was a woman said to dress like a man.

Whatever their sex, background, political leaning, or fashion sense, readers read to an audience of diverse origins. Members were as likely to hail from Spain, Mexico, or Italy as they were Cuba. Ybor City’s cigar factories also attracted workers from elsewhere in the U.S., such as Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New York. Lack of formal education was characteristic among them, but it proved no impediment. They shared a love for the works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Flaubert, and other immortals of world literature. The adventure novels of Dumas père always satisfied and, as already noted, the unflinchingly realistic tales by Zola seldom failed to meet with a strong response. Spanish novelists Armando Palacio Veldés and Benito Pérez Galdós were favorites, as well.

The workers did understand that they sometimes needed a break from the warm bath of literature for a sobering plunge into current events. To this end they charged their readers with reading daily newspapers to them. (Here added distinction fell to readers who were fluently bilingual, as they often had to translate into Spanish English-only periodicals on the fly.) When time came for a return to sweetness and light, a vote was held to select the work to be read next. The ritual served to settle disputes concerning tastes, and it generated real excitement. The winning group of workers would cheer whenever their choice won and would sometimes even gloat. Fortunately, any dispute over reading matter rarely met with tragedy, the shootout of December 1903 standing as one rather shocking exception.

Readers took added pains to head off disputes by creating a strict schedule of reading for the working day. The news claimed the morning, with readers reading it for an hour and 45 minutes or so. In the afternoon, fiction ruled. Readers read it for about two hours. “I try to vary the reading as much as I am able,” explained one reader, “not only to please the workers in the shop, but also in order to treat myself with kindness.” The kindness shown to readers by workers could be quite lavish. They gave them fresh Cuban bread, coffee, and cigars for stamina, and generous pay for their service. In 1890, the lowest-earning reader pulled in about $20 a week, which amounts to about $780 in today’s money, with the top-earning readers receiving as much as $125, or about $3,900 today. The basis of their pay was a weekly fee of 25 cents per worker, which they collected every Saturday, the day that closed out the work week, by positioning themselves near the factory door at the end of the shift. Workers who claimed not to enjoy the selections read that week would try to hold out. Yet most workers paid up without complaint; they understood that a more pleasurable selection was bound to make the reader’s rotation sooner or later.

The generous compensation reflected the great difficulty facing any would-be reader. Cigar factory workers had high standards, and they devised tests and trials to ensure the would-be readers could meet them. Candidates were summoned to a bench, there to read aloud a selection chosen by the workers. The ringing of a bell signaled candidates to begin and a second ringing, to end. The workers listened carefully to the candidates’ enunciation and scrutinized gestures they made to bring the story alive. Then they voted by secret ballot for their favorite contestant.

Perhaps inevitably, readers often held firm political and intellectual convictions, and they contrived ways to impart their convictions to the workers. Happy for them, workers in the cigar factories savored polemic and potboiler with equal relish. Indeed, it was the cigar factories of Ybor City and elsewhere throughout the Tampa Bay region that helped incubate the movement to free Cuba from Spanish colonial rule. (The readers themselves took up collections to bring Cuban poet and nationalist José Martí to Florida.) And once Cuba was free, the readers would continue to instigate social change, sparking general strikes, mass protests, and other forms of labor unrest well into the 1930s.

Labor Day has now passed, but we can still keep the revolutionary spirit of the cigar workers, and their beloved books, alive with ropa vieja, the national dish of Cuba.

Ropa Vieja (via Recipe Source)

• 3 pounds flank steak
• 1–¹⁄₂ cups water
• 6 whole garlic, peeled
• 6 whole black peppercorns
• salt to taste
• 8 poblano peppers, fresh
• ¹⁄₂ cup lard, bacon drippings, or veg. oil
• 2 garlic clove, peeled and sliced
• 1 large onion, sliced ¹⁄₈” thick
• flour tortilla(s)

Cut the flank steak in half horizontally so it will fit into a large Dutch oven. Place it in the pot and cover it with the water. Add the six whole cloves of garlic, along with the peppercorns and salt as desired. Place over low heat and bring the liquid to a simmer. Cover and continue cooking over low heat, turning the meat occasionally, until it is tender and well done, about one and a half to two hours.

While the meat is stewing roast, peel and seed the peppers and slice each pepper lengthwise into strips an eighth of an inch wide. Set aside.

When the meat is tender, remove the Dutch oven from the heat and let the meat cool in its own broth. When it cold enough to handle, remove it from the broth and place it on a cutting board. Slice the meat across the grain into strips about two inches across. Using your fingers, pull the meat into fine shreds. Return it to the broth.

Heat the lard or other fat in a large heavy skillet over medium heat until it is rippling. Crush the sliced garlic cloves and add to the hot fat. Sauté for one minute, stirring frequently. Add the sliced onions and sauté until it’s somewhat soft, about three minutes. Add the reserved pepper strips to the pan and continue sauteing and stirring for about two minutes.

Using a slotted spoon, transfer the peppers, onion and garlic to the Dutch oven. Cook the meat mixture, uncovered, over medium heat, stirring frequently until the flavors are blended about 10 to 15 minutes. Serve the meat hot, rolled up in heated flour tortillas.

If you’d like to learn more, please see El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader by Araceli Tinajero. It was the source of information for this post.

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Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor … Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer” (1841)

Of those writers who flung themselves against Mt. Monadnock’s steep, rugged slopes, arguably the most famous and widely read, Walden author Henry David Thoreau, came not to pen soaring verse, as his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoyed doing, nor solely to thrill at the view. Over the course of his relatively short life, Thoreau scaled Monadnock four or five times. Each time he’d train to Cheshire County, New Hampshire from his native Concord, Massachusetts wearing hobnailed boots and carrying plum cake and salt beef, his preferred camp rations. He detailed these expeditions in his journals. From them we know that Thoreau certainly admired Monadnock’s views. Yet what excited him even more than the summit were the summit’s berries: blueberries and huckleberries, and even the rare mountain cranberry. On Monadnock the sun-kissed treats thronged in easy abundance. “Nature heaps the table with berries for six weeks or more,” Thoreau wrote, a profusion “wholesome, bountiful, and free.” As they presented “real ambrosia” for anyone with enough energy to reap, Thoreau found it absurd that so few people stirred to the task.

Thoreau himself found the task undeniably stirring. For Monadnock’s sweet plenty he cultivated truly discriminating tastes. He noted the differences in flavor among all the mountain’s berries, as well as differences within kinds. The huckleberry, for example, he deemed “palatable” and varying subtly in flavor according to conditions. These variations owed to the flavor’s being “slightly modified by soil and climate.” Huckleberries had a terroir. Pear-shaped huckleberries were sweet. Another sweet variety grew in swamps on bushes tall and slender and had skins stippled with resinous dots. And there was one variety of huckleberry so particular that it could be found in only three or four places in Concord. This variety was as sweet as it was rare — so sweet and rare in fact that Concord locals found it a suitable substitute for money. Thoreau, however, stood as an exception. A farmer once paid him in this medium of exchange, much to his dismay. “I shall beware of red huckleberry gifts in the future,” he vowed.

Thoreau esteemed wild huckleberries, if perhaps not as a wage. But he cherished mountain cranberries. “Perhaps the prettiest berry” he wrote in his journal after encountering several bushes on a trip up Monadnock in early August 1860, “certainly the most novel and interesting to me.” To Thoreau’s delight, they could be found on the mountain in decent numbers. On the low southern spur, he came across a patch nestled between the rocks among mosses and lichens. The plants rose scarcely one inch above the ground, yet he had no trouble spotting them. Their vines, covered in thick, glossy leaves, grew an inch-and-a-half in length. The red-cheeked berries clustered two or three together and equaled huckleberries in size. He eagerly dabbed here and there with his fingers pressed together, a technique he judged best for collecting mountain cranberries, until he had gathered a pint.

Thoreau ate the small harvest for breakfast the next morning. He stewed them over a fire, and thought they were the best fruit on Monadnock, despite being somewhat underripe and bitter. Indeed, he welcomed this sharpness. “It is such an acid as the camper-out craves,” he noted in his characteristically uncomplaining way. (His companion on this foray felt differently. George Emerson, cousin of Ralph Waldo, called the breakfast “austere,” and considered the mountain cranberry inferior to its common cousin of the lowland bogs in and around Concord.)

No more mindful or scrupulous a berry hunter was there than Thoreau. In his writings he not only kept extensive notes on his foraging; he also acknowledged his debt to those for whom the land and its bounty was their long heritage. In a piece entitled “Black Huckleberry,” Thoreau discusses how it was the indigenous peoples of New England who knew best how to collect and prepare wild berries. It was they who showed explorers and colonizers how to make the most of their nutrition and flavor. They sometimes added dried raspberries and blueberries to a bread made of pounded corn and boiled and mashed beans. They also dried them like prunes, reduced them to confits, mixed them in gruels, and baked them into loaves. And they made Sautauthig, the basis for which were berries that had been dried and pounded into meal. Thoreau mentions the regard in which Sautauthig was held, being to the native people “as sweet … as plum or spice cake is to the English.”

What berries the indigenous people did not eat fresh, they dried. Quoting American botanist John Bartram, Thoreau writes how women would set “four sticks in the ground,” each stick standing “about three or four feet high.” The women then laid “others across” and the resulting lattice served as a surface for saw-wort fronds. Thus was prepared a bed for berries, which the women spread “as malt is spread on the hair cloth over the kiln.” Under the berries the women kindled “a smoke fire.” Once the berries were sufficiently dry, they were mixed into fresh maize bread baked in oblong loaves, which were so packed with huckleberries that they lay “as close in it as the raisins in a plum pudding.”

Thoreau took inspiration from these simple recipes. He too liked foods unadorned by spices and exotic ingredients, and he allowed himself only small portions. This was largely because he abhorred gluttony. To his mind, it was a vice that pushed out waistlines, certainly. Yet it also pushed out the borders of the nation. And Thoreau had no patience for the expansion of either. Such expansion meant to him nothing but rampant land speculation and waste, extermination of native people, and eventual degeneration of the entire country. “The gross feeder is a man in the larva state,” he wrote, “and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.” Thoreau believed that individuals sinned against nature when they overate, and that they compounded the sin when they ate food imported from outside their local environment. Thoreau was, in other words, a locavore, avant la lettre.

It’s a rare person who can commit to eating locally. The practice means long spates of dreary meals as foods go out of season. Present-day New Englanders, for example, would have to exchange the delights of oranges and strawberries in February for cabbages and dried apples. But the global trade that brings us such fruits also comes with trade-offs — and some bitterer than an underripe mountain cranberry, at that. A simpler, local, and more sustainable way of life no longer seems so humdrum. How convenient, then, that it’s nearly huckleberry season.

Thoreau recommends that foragers in New England look for berries beginning in the second or third week of July. By the first week of August, they’ll be at the peak of the season. What better way, then, to observe the occasion than by grabbing your pail to fill with huckleberries you’ve picked yourself. And what better way to enjoy your handpicked huckleberries than by baking them in a pie. The following simple recipe from Fruit Recipes: A Manual of the Food Value of Fruits and Nine Hundred Different Ways of Using Them (1907) will help you bake one to tempt even Thoreau to overindulgence. And don’t worry. If you need to work off the calories, the summit of Mt. Monadnock awaits you.

Whortleberry or Huckleberry Pie

Line the sides of baking dish or pan with paste and fill centre with the berries, sprinkling with sugar, adding a lump of butter and a tablespoon each of flour and water. Flavor with lemon or cranberry juice. Cover with crust or lattice strips and bake.

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Let’s enjoy the carnival of the inflation. It’s loads of fun and paper, printed paper, flimsy stuff — do they still call it money? … Krupp and Stinnes get rid of their debts, we of our savings. The profiteers dance in the palace hotels.

–Klaus Mann (1923)

The capital of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–1933), Berlin alone was home to some twenty thousand eateries. The immense number reflected not so much a diversity of tastes for cuisine as a panoply of preferences for entertainment. In keeping with the spirit of the times, those latter tastes often ran to the grotesque and the perverse. Many of the metropolis’s restaurateurs augmented their bill of fare, top-heavy with hearty German staples, with marvels astonishing and often terrible to behold. A restaurant’s real draw was not so much the tenderness of its roast pork nor the pungency of its sauerkraut as it was the arresting spectacle of its stage show.

There was, for example, the resident hunger artist of the Hackepeter, a restaurant that took its name from its signature dish of raw ground pork seasoned with sundry spices and served twenty ways. Known as Jolly, the hunger artist earned his living and his fame by displaying his wasted frame as patrons tucked into or awaited their meals. Stark was the contrast between the fleshy epicures and the gaunt feature attraction — a contrast made starker still by the glass booth to which Jolly was confined. The effect was something of a cross between an anchorite and a museum specimen.

From this booth Jolly looked off into the distance, absently smoking cigarettes. Any diner seized with a devious impulse to slip Jolly food found himself turned aside by two attendants, clad in black, who flanked Jolly’s booth expressly for discouraging such pranks. A record of how long Jolly had denied himself food was kept, and, whenever he’d reach a new milestone, an announcement was made by a diminutive gentleman. Diners who found the update sufficiently impressive registered their approval by banging silverware and beer steins on their tables. Some of the noisiest bangers were women. Jolly worked on them a romantic charm by looking the very picture of a melancholy Christ. So winning was this impression Jolly left on the fairer sex that he was eventually lured from his booth by a member of the Rockefeller clan, who persuaded him to elope with her to the United States.

Jolly’s hunger act wasn’t the only one in town. A competitor plied his version of aesthetic inanition at a Berlin eatery by the name of Zum Goldener Hahn. His was a more dignified mien. Like Jolly, he took languid pulls from a cigarette as diners looked on. Unlike Jolly, however, he wore a dress jacket. He was also similarly confined, only his clear-walled prison was a giant bell jar rather than a glass booth. Enclosed with him was a marble table on which sat a glass of water. The resident hunger artist would gaze at it as if contemplating a sip, and the pose delighted diners as they put away plates of schnitzel and fried potatoes. A blackboard displayed near the performer’s bell jar kept a running total of his days without food.

Strange as Weimar-era hunger artists seemed, they were among the tamer attractions that the city had to offer. Berliners could seek other, more immersive respites from their intolerable reality. Some restaurants featured waiters dressed as celebrities — Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, or Sandra Bernhardt. Others conjured entire exotic locales. The restaurant Heaven and Hell invited a patron to choose between being served by angels or devils. (In celebration of their moral decay, many chose to dine with the latter.) “Every nation under one roof,” read the motto of Haus Vaterland, an immense complex of twelve theme restaurants. Patrons could sip whiskey in a Wild West saloon while being waited on by servers in ten-gallon hats, or they could take tea beneath the cherry blossoms of a Japanese garden. Those who hankered for something more familiar enjoyed sausage in a Viennese cafe, where they could gaze upon an artificial panorama of bosky hills entwined with rail lines and canals upon which steamed trains and boats.

As impressive as these feats of imagination were, nothing could compare to the Vaterland’s most impressive restaurant of all: the Rhineland wine terrace. Here a 70-foot panorama of the Rhinish countryside took center stage. An artificial river flowed past castle ruins, and each hour an ingenious contraption produced a rainstorm, complete with thunder and lightning. At the storm’s climax, a downpour gave way to sunshine and rainbows. “These five minutes were said to be the best theater in Berlin,” one devoted patron of the establishment attested.

Vaterland may have offered the best theater, but it was the Residenz-Casino that offered the best chance for diversion of the more sumptuous kind. Built in 1908, this wonderland of dance halls and dining rooms, known popularly as the Resi, accommodated up to a 1,000 people on several floors. Diners and dancers could gaze heavenward at ceilings painted with exotic flora and brightly colored birds, or marvel at geysers that spouted colored water above which dozens of mirrored balls twirled and split open like sparkling flowers. If these scenes didn’t sufficiently awe them, they could beguile the evening hours in a wine room, shooting gallery, or even a carousel upon which the young at heart clung to the necks of gaily painted horses.

Yet these rooms were a mere foretaste of the main attraction: vast dining halls featuring tables at which telephones and pneumatic tubes had been installed. Here would-be Lotharios could call up some fetching lady across the room. If she showed herself receptive to this initial overture, the suitor could order a trinket from a menu containing some 135 items (perfumes, cigar cutters, chocolates) and send it via an elaborate system of pneumatic tubes. Attached to the end of each tube was a basket to catch the bauble. Evenings at the Resi were whiled away sending and receiving messages and gifts. And lest things becoming too bawdy, messages were waylaid by censors for inspection before being sent to their destination.

”We want narcotics and kisses to forget our wretchedness.“ Such was the sentiment of interwar Weimar Berlin as summed up by writer Klaus Mann. Restaurants of the period offered both. Unfortunately, the diversions they offered could not halt history’s march. Allied bombers destroyed the Resi in 1944, and the other restaurants fared little better. Yet their memory lives on, a testament to the ingenuities that can arise amidst human misery. Our own dreary moment has yet to give rise to such fanciful haunts, but should you wish to create a Resi of the mind, try this recipe for fried pork cutlets from the Henriette Davidis Kochbuch (1920, published in Berlin).

Scheinekotelettes gehackt (Fried pork cutlets)

Season two pounds ground pork with some pepper and finely chopped onion. Then form them into patties and dip into egg and breadcrumbs. Fry in butter or lard on both sides until nicely browned.

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I heard the planes go over
With shuttle and with roar
The moon looked down on Dover
And lit the winding shore.
It filled the night with beauty,
Our tired world’s release:
Old wardens at their duty
Invoked a prayer for peace.
–T. A. Agius, O.S.B., “Wartime Christmas,”

A sprig of mistletoe was all Pam Ashford wanted for Christmas, 1941. It surely would’ve livened up the office of the Glasgow coal-shipping firm for which the 38-year-old worked — an office she described at one point as “death heated up.” And it would’ve marked a welcome addition to the tin of shortbread biscuits and tiny cash bonus given to her by the firm’s honchos. At the very least, the bit of seasonal greenery would’ve leavened dull routine with a dash of the aleatory. Pam Ashford wanted it “just to see what would happen,” as she confided to a colleague. Later in private she walked back this wish. “But certainly I could never rise to that level of audacity,” she wrote in her diary.

We know of these Yuletide yearnings because Pam Ashford was a mass observer. That is, she participated in the Mass Observation social research project started in 1937 by a group of former Cambridge students. They intended the project to gauge the public mood, through reports and diary entries of some 500 volunteers, on everything from Edward VIII’s abdication to holiday preparations. Though the project seemed benign enough and even useful, it had its detractors. Critics called it a mass surveillance project, sensing in it ulterior motives. Whatever the misgivings of skeptics, the project nonetheless proved popular. Participants found it a welcome diversion from conditions of economic depression and, later, war.

Pam Ashford (a pseudonym) must have found it an especially welcome diversion, for she proved an uncommonly adept diarist. A single, middle-aged woman who lived with her mother, she filled her entries with colorful anecdotes and detailed accounts of the daily struggles of life under the blitz. She recounted the story of a woman who drove her car into a bomb crater while trying to get home in a blackout one night. She found her way home by other means; and, when she arrived to fetch her car the next morning, she saw nothing but a twisted mass of metal, a second bomb having struck the crater after she left.

Other of life’s trials were not nearly so explosive. Much ink Pam Ashford spilled on her pet canary, Dick. Unlike the rest of the household, Dick apparently found it difficult to adapt to wartime conditions and its attendant privations. The situation caused Dick to sulk, especially as it meant his familiar food, bird seed, was hard to obtain. Simply no substitute would do, if the account of Pam Ashford may be believed. “Mother gave him a sandwich of bread, sugar and butter, and he would have none of it,” she wrote.

When her cantankerous canary didn‘t occupy her thoughts, the usual sort of scuttlebutt did. Pam Ashford delighted in office gossip. And she was evidently not one to miss a chance at enjoying life’s delights, few though they might have been. She hoarded meat and tinned soup whenever the opportunity presented itself. Indeed, she prided herself on the “magnificent reserves” she’d managed to lay by.

This last diversion was a hedge against the shortages and inflation that became increasingly vexatious as the war dragged on. Common foods vanished from shop shelves. “Do the Government intend the civilian population to live on potatoes and bread?,” Pam asked of her diary. She did take an impish glee from learning of those who ran through their sugar rations from drinking tea “umpteen times a day and always with heaped spoonfuls,” and she took a smug satisfaction from learning that a colleague was forced to use artificial sweetener. She herself carefully portioned out her stores of treats and nibbled her favorite, biscuits, in “the darkness of the cinema” she went to to pass the hours.

Yet Christmas, 1941 was a time of unexpected abundance. At 9:30 AM, Pam Ashford got her wish. The firm’s managing director gave her a huge spray of mistletoe. Fearing that he would demand a kiss in exchange for this present, she dove for cover behind a table. The threat of bussing passed, so she set the mistletoe on a mantlepiece for everyone to enjoy. The good luck continued into the next day. She managed to purchase chicken, a food that, as she wrote, “Mother for weeks has been saying would be unobtainable.” She made a Christmas pudding, too. After dinner she went shopping, and found a tin of Armour’s spiced pork to add to her hoard of hard-to-get commodities.

And all the while no enemy planes appeared on the horizon, and no bombs fell. The small pleasures that make life worth living remained undisturbed. “As long as we have a peaceful Christmas Day there is hope for this civilisation of ours,” Pam reflected in one diary entry from around the time.

Is there hope for ours? It remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, you can enjoy a bit of wartime cheer of old by making this eggless Christmas cake from Wartime Cookbook: Food and Recipes from the Second World War 1939–45 (1995).

Eggless Christmas Cake

4 oz carrot, finely grated
2 tbsp golden syrup
3 oz sugar
4 oz margarine
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp almond essence
½ tsp vanilla essence
4–6 oz dried fruit
12 oz self-rising flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 small teacup milk, slightly warmed

Cook the grated carrot and syrup over a low heat for a few minutes. Cream the sugar and margarine until light and fluffy. Stir the bicarbonate of soda into the carrot and syrup mixture, then beat it into into the sugar and margarine, using it as if it were an egg. Stir in the flavourings and dried fruit. Fold in the flour and the cinnamon and add the warmed milk to make a moist dough. Put into a greased cake tin. Smooth the top and make a deep hole in the centre with a spoon, to stop the cake from rising too much during cooking. Put it into a hot oven (220 degrees C, 425 degrees F, gas mark 7) and turn down to a very low heat (150 degrees C, 300 degrees F, gas mark 2) and bake for 3 hours.

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And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up copies of my books, Why Fast? and Fermented Foods.