A Typeface for Mrs. Pollifax

The Mrs. Pollifax books are delightful so when I found a copy of A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax in a little free library, I took it even though I'd read it six years ago and even though it was a cheap trade paperback from 1973. 

Imagine my delight at the typography! That chapter heading typeface looks just like the font I used in junior high school shop class to make personalized stationery. It's kind of awful and wonderful, and harkens back to old school handwriting: the capital F, the capital L. 

I think it's either Coronet or Ribbon, thanks to What The Font, a nifty site where you can upload an image and it'll identify the typeface. 

Also, I did rather enjoy the description of golf, even if "greensward" is one word (not two):

In Langley, Virginia, it was mid-afternoon. Carstairs inserted the key into the lock of his office door and entered with a sigh of deep relief. He felt he had been excessively well-behaved today. He had risen at dawn, driven bumper-to-bumper to the golf club, awaited his turn in a milling crowd and played eighteen holes of golf under a humid, 90-degree sun. His doctor had told him the fresh air and exercise would rejuvenate him but instead he felt hot, irritable, and betrayed. To a man accustomed to deploying live human beings around the world he could think of nothing more idiotic than mindlessly pushing an inanimate ball around a green sward in the sun.

In Which Lung Cancer Meets A Birthday

Today is my sister’s birthday. She's pretty cute, eh?

More than 8 years ago, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. For the past 8 years, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of lung cancer research and advocacy. Among other things, she served as a patient representative to panels run by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP).

What is the CDMRP? From its website:

The CDMRP originated in 1992 via a Congressional appropriation to foster novel approaches to biomedical research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders-the American public, the military, and Congress.

One of the specific and unusual aspects of the program is that they involve consumer advocates throughout the program cycle – that’s what my sister did for several program cycles.

She was even profiled on the CDMRP’s website (and/but you'll notice I had to go to the Internet Archive to find "her" page). What she said about her association with the CDMRP is:

The work is hard, especially for someone like me who lacks a scientific background. The opportunity, however, to participate in something so important makes all the hours spent sweating over the applications thoroughly worthwhile. I feel tremendous hope for the future when I get to see what the researchers are working on, and I am always honored and humbled to share a conference table with the brilliant scientists who are superheroes to me and my fellow patients. To be able to provide the patient perspective on proposed research is a gift that I cherish, and I take great pride in the work I have been able to do for the LCRP.

Besides the fact that it’s her birthday, why am I writing about this?

Because the current year’s budget for the CDMRP is about 43% of what it was last year, and lung cancer has been cut out altogether.

What kind of cancer kllls more people than any other, by a lot? LUNG CANCER.

If you feel up to it, please complain to your congressional representative. And if you have a few spare nickels, please consider a donation to Lungevity. Thanks.

In which we put our heads in the sand

The other day, I was rummaging around on the intertubes, and I landed on a TimesMachine page for a 1952 copy of the New York Times. What really intrigued me wasn't the newsy stuff on that page, the stuff I'd been looking for - but that on the lower right hand corner appeared a crossword puzzle! An edited by Margaret Farrar puzzle, from 1952.

Being a person who *really* likes doing the NYT puzzle every single day in pen, I grabbed the puzzle image and printed it out for my train ride home.

And man, it is HARD. It is larded with things I had to look up - like "Creator of Mr. Tutt" and "Governor of Hawaii" and "Senator from Tacoma". And it's full of uncommon (archaic) words like the answers to "Assumes presumptuously" and "Roasted" and "Splinter". And then there was the blasé generic "Actress from Germany". I did get "White House initials-to-be" right off the bat because that answer still turns up in current puzzles - though clued way differently (i.e. W.W. II hero who retired from the mil. to run for president or H.S.T.'s successor or Onetime White House inits.)

All in all, it was an entertaining and engaging exercise but I hope to not encounter a "Relative of the civet" or a "Two-year-old sheep" anytime soon.

If you'd like to try, here you go:

And the 2025 classic read is ...

Middlemarch. Yes, I've read it before - I read it in college for English 272, which was a survey class on some 19th century Brit Lit classics. (I still have the asssigned copy, which is why I know what specific class it was ... I wrote it inside the cover.)

But Middlemarch slithered into my consciousness because of that column in the New York Times Book Review called "By The Book" - a weekly interview with some author who has just published something. I skim it every week, and often it's too twee for words, but what I started to notice was how many people mentioned Middlemarch in response to a question.

• What books are on your night stand?
• What books are you embarrassed to admit you’ve never read?
• What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
• What’s the last great book you read?
• Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Because this had come up in conversation, on Sunday, my sister texted me a picture of the 12/29/2024 book review because yes, Elda Rotor named Middlemarch as something she was embarrassed not to have read.

In a fit of something or other, I sat down at my computer and I methodically searched the Times website for the entirety of 2024, and located 51 of the 52 "By The Book"columns. There may have been one on 9/1/24 - but I couldn't surface it. And 11 times in 51 weeks, someone answered Middlemarch. That's 20 or 22% of the time! (Math is complicated because Robert Kagan gave Middlemarch as the answer to two different questions in the same interview.)  If you would like to see the fruits of my labors, I made a spreadsheet - it's here. 

This is a long way around to explain why I'm cracking Middlemarch open later.

War and Peace: COMPLETED

At the end of last year, I learned about a "slow read" of War and Peace. Something about the idea of reading a chapter a day intrigued me so I bought a used paperback, of the Louise & Aylmer Maude translation, and plunged in. 

For the most part, I did actually read a chapter a day, although there were a few moments when I got behind and caught up, or read ahead because it would fit better into my life. And let me tell you, War and Peace is a potboiler of an action-packed soap opera. That is, up until the second epilogue in which Leo gets all philosophical and stops talking about the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. And Pierre. To be honest, I think just reading it straight through over, say, a month might have been better. I remember the experience of reading A Suitable Boy and feeling completely bereft at the end; I missed all of those people that I'd spent every evening in bed with. Taking an entire year to read War and Peace meant bite sized reading sessions - but also meant that by the end, I'd forgotten what happened at the beginning. Well, not really, there were a lot of parties at the beginning. 

Anyway - if you so desire - the slow read was under the auspices of one Simon Haisell, at Footnotes & Tangents. Every day, there's a group chat, and every week, Simon does a wrap up. And some kind soul provided merit badges for the end of every section. 

As for me?  I am damned happy to have read it, finished it, done the thing I set out to do. 

April 1st

Of course yes, it's April Fool's Day. It's also the birthday of Gil Scott-Heron (b. 1949), and the anniversary of the day that Singapore became a British crown colony (in 1867), and the date that then-President Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law (in 1970), and when Google launched gmail (2004). And in 2009, my mother died. Fifteen years ago.

She sits beside me - in the books on my shelves, the objects hanging on the dining room walls, the roll top desk in the next room. Her plants are in my garden, a bottle of her perfume is on my dresser.

Last fall, my husband and I visited our daughter in the south of France. Shortly before our trip, my sister unearthed a small spiral bound notebook, with the notes my mother had taken when she took my siblings to the same general area in 1985. I scanned the whole thing and took it with us. It's a gem, and we are still quoting aloud from it. Taking that notebook with us was like having her along.

Cavaillon - the Hempstead of France

Here she is, hiding behind an urn, in 1985:

Moky as Gorey character

I miss her. But I am glad to have her around in the ways that I do.

In Which We Attempt That Baked Icing

I'm not going to lie: the spice cake with the baked icing intrigued me, because "baked icing". I had never heard of such a thing. But I am a person that owns two copies of The Joy of Cooking, 1953 and 1975, so I pulled them out and sure enough, both editions had a baked icing recipe.

The Joy of Cooking, 1953

The Joy of Cooking, 1975

How about that language change around the addition of cocoa? In 1953, cocoa varies the flavor, but in 1975 it provides an exciting new taste!

I made Mrs. Wright's recipe more or less as written, and while it was okay, I don't think I'll do it again - mostly because it's hella sweet. The icing is interesting though - it's essentially a baked meringue topping, spread thinly and baked long enough that it's brittle. Also - it's fragile and a little tricky to get out of the pan - it would probably be best baked in a loose bottomed pan.

If you want to try it, here's a slightly tweaked version of Mrs. Wright's recipe. (I used butter and yogurt in place of shortening and soured milk, added ginger, and left off the nuts.)

SPICE CAKE WITH BAKED ICING

• 1/2 cup softened butter (1 stick) 
• 1 cup brown sugar 
• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk 
• 1 1/2 cups flour 
• 1/4 t. salt 
• 1/2 t. cinnamon 
• 1/2 t. ground ginger 
• 1/2 t. ground cloves 
• 1/2 cup yogurt (not greek)

Preheat oven to 350° F. Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and egg yolk; beat well. In a separate bowl, stir together all dry ingredients. Add flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg, alternately with the yogurt.

Spread into a greased & floured pan (1 8" square, or two loaf pans). Use a parchment sling, or a loose bottomed pan, if you want to be able to get the cake out of the pan in one piece.

• 1 egg white 
• pinch of salt 
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

Beat egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Mix in the salt and brown sugar. Gently spread this meringue on top of the batter. Bake 30-35 minutes. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes, and then gently move the cake to a serving plate.

Time For Dessert (part 3 of 3)

The last two of Mrs. Wright's recipe cards are for desserts that are a little off the beaten path. When was the last time you had a dessert with concord grades, or a baked icing? Indeed, when have you even heard of a baked icing?

If you've been around my blog for a while, you may remember a concord grape pie courtesy of a different neighbor, Ruth. Marian's Concord Grape Crunch isn't a pie - it's got an crust of oatmeal/butter/sugar pressed into a pan, spread with concord grape "filling", and topped with crumbles of the rest of the oatmeal/butter/sugar mix. Of course, true to form, there is no recipe for the filling - once agin, as in so many of Marian's recipes, one is just expected to know how to make a [fill in the blank]. This card's in someone else's handwriting, but I'm pretty sure it's not the next door neighbor Ruth's hand.

I confess that the part of this next and last recipe that attracted me was the "baked" icing. Reading the card, it's a pretty basic spice cake, but the last step before it goes in the oven is to make an egg white & brown sugar meringue, and spread that on top of the raw cake batter. I'm a little intrigued.

I also love the addendum with the instructions on how to sour milk.

I think March will be "make all the things" month.

Time For Dessert (part 2 of 3)

The next two desserts are both familiar and not particularly exotic: Pecan Tassies and a Lemon Loaf Cake. It is possible that I kept the card for the pecan tassies because of another neighbor who always made them (and who, together with her husband and 215 other people died in the crash of EgyptAir 990), but I don't know that Marian got this particular recipe from Sharon. Maybe, maybe not. If you've never had pecan tassies, they are a bit like tiny pecan pies, with a hint towards rugelach since they're made with a cream cheese dough.

There are a million recipes for lemon loaf cakes - and yet, this one spoke to me. Maybe because it's typed? With a pencil direction "For Mrs. Wright"? Maybe because it's got BUTTER (instead of the margarine in other of Marian's recipes - like the pecan tassies)? Maybe because of the precision of the recipe with its admonition to "not beat the eggs". Although, the oven temperature is merely given as "moderate", and when do you add the grated rind of one lemon which "furnishes the flavoring"? I might make this.

Time For Dessert (part 1 of 3)

In all the time that I knew Mrs. Wright, what I knew her for - kitchen-wise - was dessert. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that I kept six recipes for sweets (seven if you include the "dessert" in the jello post).

Today's installment of Mrs. Wright's recipes includes two. The first one confuses me, and I kind of want to send it to B. Dylan Hollis for his take. It includes cooked mashed potatoes, and peanut butter, but after you make a dough with the mashed potates, and smear the peanut butter on, and roll it up, what then? Is it done? Does it need further baking, chilling, anything? Peculiar.

Also it's on a larger than usual index card, which had to be folded to fit in the standard 3" x 5" box, and it's in someone else's handwriting. Where did it come from?

Mrs. Wright was terrific at pizzele. She and my mother would compare notes and my mother's were never as good as Marian's. This is another example of a recipe for someone who knows how to cook. No instructions whatsoever - just a list of ingredients. If you want to be picky, there are two verbs: melt and add. But the proof of pizzele is in the baking. (And I wonder what happened to my mother's pizzele iron...and Marian's for that matter.)

Never Olive Oil

Next up in the cavalcade of index cards: Dressings and Condiments.

Mrs. Wright's raw cranberry relish is much like my mother's - that is, raw cranberries and a whole orange, with some sugar - but it has the addition of a ground up apple or two. I might try that one day.

I think I kept the poppy seed dressing recipe solely for the admonition - in a different hand! - that the salad oil should never be olive oil. It sounds terribly sweet, what with twice as much sugar as vinegar. What would you dress with this? [Nothing. I can't imagine making this.]

And I know I kept the Tomato Conserve card because of the handwriting. Such a beautiful old hand, with the title leaning to the left, and the body copy leaning to the right. Also, this is a recipe meant to be canned, and sealed with hot paraffin. My grandmother, and several of the neighbors, used to can with paraffin, and I remember that satisfying pop when you gently rocked the paraffin off the top of the jam. And of course, you washed off the paraffin disk so it could be remelted and reused. Thrift! The Tomato Conserve, though. It sounds rather like a chutney - tomatoes, lemon, raisins, walnuts - but it lacks any seasoning, and might be kind of boring.

Mrs. Wright's Main Courses

As promised, here are some more of Mrs. Wright's recipe cards. I kept only a tiny handful that fall into the category of main courses - a pot roast, some meatballs, a chicken dish, and a thoroughly gross sounding recipe for tuna on biscuits.

Pot roast might be my favorite. This is clearly the recipe of someone who knows how to cook, and just needs an outline. There is no cooking time, there are no instructions. It's really just fling a piece of meat in the crockpot with a package of onion soup mix and bob's your uncle.

Buzzy's meatballs are similarly vague - do you sauté the meatballs, or cook them in the gravy? I guess you sauté them, because the gravy calls for "fat from the meat". And what makes them Swedish anyway? It's not like they've got lingonberry jam on the side. Like the pot roast recipe, this one's gonna be useless to anyone doesn't know how to cook. (And who is Buzzy??)

I would guess that the Chicken Oahu is Hawaiian in that it has pineapple. Interestingly, though, it's the sauce that's called "Oahu sauce" - and the pineapple isn't in the sauce. In short - you brown some chicken, cook it in the crockpot on a bed of stuffing cubes and pineapple, and then spoon an odd sauce over the top. The sauce is celery, onion and green pepper, simmered in a bit of water, and enriched with sour cream and cream of mushroom soup, and seasoned with a bit of soy sauce. To be honest, the whole thing sounds nasty.

But Tuna on Biscuits takes the cake for nasty. Hot tuna, in a milky sauce, with hard boiled eggs. Poor biscuits. What did they do to deserve that?

All About Jello

For years, really, like (counts on fingers) 18 years, I have had an envelope with a little stack of recipe cards in it. I move it from time to time, not wanting to throw the cards out, but not ready to *do* something with them. You see, they were part of a dumpster-dive haul when the lady across the street from my mom got moved to assisted living, and her house was emptied and sold and torn down and replaced with a shitty McMansion. Lots of the cards are in Marian's handwriting, but some aren't and one's typed and finally today I got them scanned.

Five are for jello or jello "salads". I mean, when was the last time you had jello salad or gelatinized anything?

First up - Cucumber Jello salad. It's definitely in the "not a dessert" category, what with the onion. I'm going to guess that you have to chill it again after you stir in the sour cream and cucumber "cut in tiny chunks"?

Next, another "not a dessert" jello: Tomato jello. Raspberry jello and a can of stewed tomatoes. I mean, I think that isn't a dessert - but what the hell is it? A side dish for a roast chicken? I wonder who Louise Reiss is (or more likely, was).

Moving on, we have two things called "salad" but both skew more towards dessert for me.

Jan's Salad is black cherry jello with fruit cocktail and frozen rasperries - with the option of chopped pecans or chopped apples.

And Fruited Nectar Salad mostly kind of sounds dessert-y - with ingredients like apricot nectar, mandarin oranges, seedless grapes and chopped apple. EXCEPT she's got a note to serve it with mayonnaise...so maybe it's not dessert after all.

Finally, we have Dessert. Just that - the card is titled dessert, the name of the recipe is dessert. It sounds a little like a lemon mousse - an egg yolk custard stirred into orange jello and then folded into beaten egg whites. Honestly, it doesn't sound too terrible. If I had some orange jello in the house, I might make it.

Still to come: meat, condiments & dressings, non-jello desserts.

I did it.

I am feeling reasonably chuffed because tonight I finished Adriene's 30 day FLOW journey - and the last practice was wordless. Yeah, I had to keep peeking at the screen, but yeah, I did it.*

Now, on to February.

*Cue: My Way

Two Truths And A Lie, musician edition

 Jeff Buckley stroked my cheek and told me I had beautiful skin. 

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Lou Reed gave me a scented candle. (Actually his first wife did, but yeah, I worked on something with him.)

26 Days Into A New Year

It’s almost the end of January, but it’s not too late to report on New Year’s Resolutions, is it? Although, maybe they aren’t really *new year* resolutions – because some are short term, and at least one began back in the summer.

1) Last summer, I started learning French in Duolingo – I have a 148 day streak. At this rate, I don’t think I’ll be fluent any time soon, but I like spending a few minutes a day working on my French.

2) A few years ago, my sister talked me into one of Adriene’s 30 day yoga journeys. I’m doing it again this year: FLOW. I missed one day a couple of weeks ago – but made it up by doing two a couple of days later. I missed another earlier this week – and I’ll make it up this weekend. Adriene’s yoga classes are on demand on YouTube, and are mostly about 20 minutes long. 20 minutes of not-difficult yoga before bed has helped me sleep better.

3) In a fit of madness, I signed up for tap dancing classes. It was a bit of synchronicity – someone in my office had spread out 57 pairs of tap shoes on the same day that someone on Facebook posted a link to a class in the town next to me at a time I could actually make. So I borrowed a pair of tap shoes, and I’m working on coordinated noise.

4) Right before the end of December, I saw a Facebook post about a slow read of War & Peace, so I’m doing that too. War & Peace is approximately 360 chapters (different editions are differently chaptered), so it’s a chapter a day for a year. There’s a guy who moderates; he provides a daily prompt for a reader chat, and a weekly sum up. And yesterday we finished book one/part one. 

Daily yoga, daily French, daily Tolstoy, weekly tap, and the daily puzzles* that I was already doing - all that adds up to a lot of regular tasks. But they are all enjoyable and maybe even rungs on a self-improvement ladder. Huh. I don't think I've ever done New Year's Resolutions before - but this year, not only have I done so, I've kept on keeping on. 

* So many puzzles:

• New York Times Crossword (daily in pen, on the train, and usually I follow it up by checking on how Rex felt about the puzzle)
• NYT Wordle (first thing in the morning, results texted to the kid, and occasionally shared more broadly if the grid of blocks is pleasing)
• NYT Connections (also in the morning)
• WAPO Keyword

Annals of Gardening: 5 May 2019

Hmm. The folder of draft posts coughed up this picture of a list from 5 May 2019 - yes, four years ago. What was I thinking?

• I believe I moved the nine bark, and it died where I put it. 
• The leucothoe is happy in its new home; it has more light than it used to, and a stone wall to droop over. It is not the best of shrubs, but I keep it because I dug it up at my mother's house rather a while ago. 
• I planted a ton of Carex pensylvanica, and none of it is still around. 
• The "lawn" is a perpetual disaster and there is a shady sloped area that just will not grow a goddamned thing. I'm ready to pebble it over. (It needs to be a walking path or I could fill it in with things that would be happy.) 
• Dumping/deploying pots happens every year. 

What's on your garden list for today?

Library books and ephemera

Need I tell you of the wonders of library books? Of course not, but I will. They are free (well, but for the modest sums folded into our taxes)! You don't need to give them house room when you are done! Sometimes other people have written bits in the margins (though they aren't supposed to). And sometimes people leave ephemera - a book mark, a ticket stub, a scrap of newspaer, or the checkout receipt if your library system is barcoded and computerized up to the hilt.

I can't remember why, but I recently took Amy Krouse Rosenthal's “Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life” out of my public library. It's lovely and heartbreaking and inspirational and funny. And its form - an encyclopedia, galloping alphabetically from entry to entry - is charmingly idiosyncratic.

Why heartbreaking? This book was published in 2005, and Rosenthal died in 2017 (at 51). In other words, she *had* died by the time I read this, but she didn't know how soon she was going to die, and how early.

DISTRACTION (p. 88)

I recognize that everything I do, from my work to going to the movies to raising children to vacuuming, might also be viewed as just one big distraction- Hey, look over here! And now, over here!-from belaboring the real issue at hand: One day I'm going to die. 

It's one thing to say "I'm going to die" - it's another to up and do it.

How funny? Nuns. Or maybe blue jeans. Or even conversations with strangers.

NUN (p. 149)

A friend sat next to a nun on a plane. He asked her what she missed most. "Wearing blue jeans," she replied.

Halfway through my reading, a prior borrower's checkout receipt fell out. It felt like the kind of random synchronicity that Rosenthal would have appreciated.

My curiosity was, of course, piqued. Usually the slips that fall out of library books are just for that single only solitary book - but here was a receipt with FOUR items on it. I looked them all up.

Besides the Rosenthal, the other items were:

• March, by Geraldine Brooks 
• The Apollo Murders: A Novel, by Chris Hadfield 
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams (DVD), a documentary by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave

I have a soft spot for murder mysteries (even if this one is about space), I recently finished one Geraldine Brooks book, a second of hers is on the to-be-read pile next to my bed, I am quite fond of Little Women, and while I am unlikely to watch a documentary on cave painting, I deeply appreciated the catholic range of the other borrower's library haul of November 2021. And I think Rosenthal would have liked this list as well.

In Which Some Oatmeal Cookies Lead To A Rabbit Hole

Every few weeks, I bake a batch of cookies and mail them off to the college kid. This morning, I was looking for a gingersnap/molasses cookie recipe in my mother's black book, but I got sidetracked by Lady Harlech's oatmeal cookies.

So I made them, with shortening even. After the dough was made, I realized that there is no salt in the recipe. So instead of squishing the cookies with a sugar-dipped glass, I seasoned the sugar with a bit of salt and cinnamon. The cookies were definitely too sweet, and sort of boring. If I try them again, I will use salted butter, and a half teaspoon of salt, and only a half a cup of white sugar. And then they won't be Lady Harlech's, they'll be mine.

Cookies aside though, I started wondering about Lady Harlech. The recipe was photocopied from somewhere, but I don't know where. Google turned up NOTHING tying Lady Harlech to any oatmeal cookies.

I detoured into ChatGPT for my own amusement, and it produced a semi-plausible bio:

Except that said bio doesn't actually track with other information I found about her - like: 

•  She married Lord Harlech in 1969. 
• I don't know where the Guiness bit came from, because her maiden name was Pamela Colin. 
• I think she was born in 1934.
• While she worked for Vogue, it was as a food editor. 
• And I think she's not dead.

The Wikipedia entry on her husband seems a whole lot more sound.

Eventually, I figured out that she published two cookbooks as Pamela Harlech. Both cookbooks (Feast Without Fuss and Practical Guide to Cooking, Entertaining, and Household Management) had been scanned into the Internet Archive, and while one contains an oatmeal cooky recipe, it's not this one.

WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Who Sits On Boards?

An article in the Times about a handful of states that are trying to legislate against ESG investing included this aside:

Keeping an eye on how climate change may affect a stock holding (or the place for a retirement home), or whether a board is made up mainly of white men from fancy colleges, is part of what anyone should consider when picking stocks.

I have teensy bits of money invested in a handful of places, and from time to time, I get proxy notices and an opportunity to vote for directors. I - without researching them - vote only for the women. It could be that I'm voting for horrible people with abhorrent opinions, but I also know that my vote is essentially meaningless and so I persist. Because boards shouldn't be only white men from fancy colleges.