Friday, April 24, 2009
Yea!
I am going to Colorado State University in the fall. I have decided and sent in all paperwork. My dearest husband is looking for work and pondering the most important of important questions, "What is more important to me in a barbershop chorus, fun or talent, and who should I sing with?" Now if only the CSU financial aid department would talk to the history department. The former continues to send me suggestions on how to take care of my $30,000+ bill. The latter claims they will take care of my bill. My vote is for the latter. Now if only I could get the former to leave me alone.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Pork Cake
Yesterday I did something I’ve been meaning to do for several years. I went to Plymouth Congregational Church to photograph a nineteenth century cookbook. I had looked forward to this day for two years and a month—really. Cookbook research is my favorite part of my job as supervisor and dinners coordinator. Geeking out while studying 100-plus-year-old recipes may not be something to which you can relate, but if you are a baseball fan, it’s probably similar to knowing the name and stats of every Yankees pitcher since the team’s inception.
Anyway, I was at this church to take pictures of every last recipe in a cookbook named by the ladies who assembled it back then, most appropriately, ‘76’ A Cookbook, and I needed those recipes to prove that all the recipes I’ve read in cookbooks from New England and the South from the 1870s were also used in Iowa. After all, I spend nearly every day trying to recreate foods eaten in 1875 Iowa. I can’t think of better documentation than a local cookbook.
I got to the church and discovered two things: 1) the cookbook I could photograph was the eighth edition printed in 1887, not the 1876 edition, and 2) they had another cookbook for me to look at and photograph. The first was slightly disappointing. The second was very, very exciting. This meant that my work was doubled, my desire to prove definitively that certain recipes were appropriate for 1875 Iowa was thwarted, and I got to make the acquaintance of two very interesting books. I enjoyed thinking that except for one historian writing for the “Annals of Iowa” twenty years ago I was the only person who had looked at these books in at least fifty years.
The books were not in great shape due to age and use. “76” had obviously belonged to someone who loved to cook. Brown spots from grease, sugar, and other food dotted its pages. The owner wrote recipes and comments in the margins and on blank pages. The cover’s printing was worn off, and the binding had completely disintegrated. The second book, Adeline Club Cook Book, was compiled by a Plymouth girls’ Sunday school group who used its sale as a fundraiser. The edges of its blue paper cover threatened to dissolve if I looked too closely at them. Still, I was up for the challenge. I spent most of the day bent over the books trying to take pictures that would be clear enough for me to read later. (I was mostly successful.)
While taking pictures, I was inevitably distracted from my work by the recipes. Cranberry ice, olive sandwiches, baked beans, salad dressing, and queen of puddings caught my attention. Some recipes made my mouth water; some grossed me out. Still, none of them were as memorable as the first recipe on page 158 of “76”. As I turned the page, my eyes fell on “PORK CAKE”. In disbelief I read, “Pour over one pound of pork chopped fine, one cup of boiling water, and add two cups of molasses, one cup of sugar, two teaspoons of soda, spices to the taste, one and a half or two pounds of raisins, one pound of citron, two eggs and flour to make as stiff as pound cake.” YUCK! Pork flavored fruit cake?! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten fruit cake and thought, “You know, this would be greatly improved by some bacon.” To make it worse, the recipe underneath read, “PORK FRUIT CAKE”, which means at least two Victorian ladies thought this recipe was tasty and worth sharing with their fellow Congregationalists.
Even while my stomach churned, my curiosity got the better of me. What if pork cake really was tasty? After all, I do have an unspoken rule that I must try something before I decide I don’t like it, and I discovered I like stewed cucumbers and dill pickle soup while following this rule. This means I’ll have to try the recipe this summer at the TH. Hopefully my staff won’t mutiny and will instead be intrigued like me. However, I get the impression pork cake is more likely to join aspics and melon on my short list of foods I consider inedible. Fortunately I’ll have a chance to try and enjoy some of the other thousand edible recipes in these cookbooks as well.
Anyway, I was at this church to take pictures of every last recipe in a cookbook named by the ladies who assembled it back then, most appropriately, ‘76’ A Cookbook, and I needed those recipes to prove that all the recipes I’ve read in cookbooks from New England and the South from the 1870s were also used in Iowa. After all, I spend nearly every day trying to recreate foods eaten in 1875 Iowa. I can’t think of better documentation than a local cookbook.
I got to the church and discovered two things: 1) the cookbook I could photograph was the eighth edition printed in 1887, not the 1876 edition, and 2) they had another cookbook for me to look at and photograph. The first was slightly disappointing. The second was very, very exciting. This meant that my work was doubled, my desire to prove definitively that certain recipes were appropriate for 1875 Iowa was thwarted, and I got to make the acquaintance of two very interesting books. I enjoyed thinking that except for one historian writing for the “Annals of Iowa” twenty years ago I was the only person who had looked at these books in at least fifty years.
The books were not in great shape due to age and use. “76” had obviously belonged to someone who loved to cook. Brown spots from grease, sugar, and other food dotted its pages. The owner wrote recipes and comments in the margins and on blank pages. The cover’s printing was worn off, and the binding had completely disintegrated. The second book, Adeline Club Cook Book, was compiled by a Plymouth girls’ Sunday school group who used its sale as a fundraiser. The edges of its blue paper cover threatened to dissolve if I looked too closely at them. Still, I was up for the challenge. I spent most of the day bent over the books trying to take pictures that would be clear enough for me to read later. (I was mostly successful.)
While taking pictures, I was inevitably distracted from my work by the recipes. Cranberry ice, olive sandwiches, baked beans, salad dressing, and queen of puddings caught my attention. Some recipes made my mouth water; some grossed me out. Still, none of them were as memorable as the first recipe on page 158 of “76”. As I turned the page, my eyes fell on “PORK CAKE”. In disbelief I read, “Pour over one pound of pork chopped fine, one cup of boiling water, and add two cups of molasses, one cup of sugar, two teaspoons of soda, spices to the taste, one and a half or two pounds of raisins, one pound of citron, two eggs and flour to make as stiff as pound cake.” YUCK! Pork flavored fruit cake?! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten fruit cake and thought, “You know, this would be greatly improved by some bacon.” To make it worse, the recipe underneath read, “PORK FRUIT CAKE”, which means at least two Victorian ladies thought this recipe was tasty and worth sharing with their fellow Congregationalists.
Even while my stomach churned, my curiosity got the better of me. What if pork cake really was tasty? After all, I do have an unspoken rule that I must try something before I decide I don’t like it, and I discovered I like stewed cucumbers and dill pickle soup while following this rule. This means I’ll have to try the recipe this summer at the TH. Hopefully my staff won’t mutiny and will instead be intrigued like me. However, I get the impression pork cake is more likely to join aspics and melon on my short list of foods I consider inedible. Fortunately I’ll have a chance to try and enjoy some of the other thousand edible recipes in these cookbooks as well.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Dinner w/ the fam
Yesterday my family came to eat dinner with me at the TH. It was really fun. The food was awesome (obviously--Allison was our cook), and I enjoyed the company of my family and some very good friends. It seems crazy to me that when I was younger getting along with my brothers was so difficult. I love hanging out with them now, even though they are the dumbest people ever at times. I almost love them FOR their irritating qualities. Almost. Perhaps my enjoyment of their company stems from the fact that we no longer live under the same roof. I see them rarely. I also lack the hormones that previously made me irrationally angry with them as a teenager. Whatever the case, I loved hanging out with them, and I left feeling like I wouldn't need to eat for a week. Yum!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Historian
"The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had--apparently--actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the "large family" dying together. For all his attention to historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understood now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth--really seen it--you can't look away.
I finished the Historian last night. My mother-in-law sent it to me. It was a fun read. I'm not much for popular fiction in general--the only other recent popular works of fiction I've read in the last five years are the DaVinci Code and Harry Potter--but it won me over. I was pretty worthless this past week while I was reading it. It's good my grad apps were in. Kostova's writing style seems straight out of the Memory Keeper's Daughter, which I didn't appreciate much. (a bit too wistfully descriptive for my tastes, I guess, though I shouldn't point fingers as I often write similarly) Still, I really enjoyed the trans-generational, trans-continental, trans-religious "mysteries of the past" plot. I felt a bit like I was reading the DaVinci Code, though I'm hoping Kostova isn't crazy like Dan Brown is in real life. When it was done I wanted to know how much information she fabricated and how much she found in research. I'm not up on my vampire lore, much to the shame of my husband and in-laws, I'm sure.
In all of this, the thing the struck me the most was a quote near the beginning of the book about how history is palatable until you realize it happened. As a historian I've wrestled with this for quite a while. It's so interesting to read stories from the past, but it's easy to allow them to remain much like fairy tales in my mind. I find it hard to believe that Ghengis Khan, George Washington, and even my great grandparents ever truly existed. Logic tells me that they did. There are pictoral and literary records to prove they lived and breathed and walked around, but they aren't real to me. I find it truly terrifying to realize a historical event actually happened, especially negative ones. The Holocaust is sick and repulsive as an idea. It's mind-numbingly sickening when that moment of clarity hits me, and I realize it happened. This sick feeling is only partly due to my realization of humans as flawed beings, capable of horrible things. I get that. It's just that much worse to see it in your mind's eye at that moment when you realize it's not just a story. Even happy stories are terrifying on some level strictly because they happened and that means the bad happened, too.
My grandpa once told me about being sent out to string phone lines during WWII and being pinned down and shot by a sniper in the back. He was paralyzed when he woke up. He went through months of grueling rehab and regained the use of his limbs. When I knew him, the only things that alluded to that story were a scar on his back, a purple heart, and his disinclination for watching fireworks. When he told it, the story was sort of exciting. I know very little about my grandpa, and it was a window into his life. But one day it hit me that that actually happened. I imagined the fear, the mud, the pain. I was paralyzed in that moment, not by a bullet, like grandpa, but by my own terror. That memory still haunts me. I wasn't even there, but every time I think about it, I feel sick and scared. It's even started to hang at the edges of every fireworks display I watch. I remember the hushed way my mom explained to me that grandpa didn't want to come watch the fireworks because they hurt his ears--and he'd seen "real" fireworks. The millions of people who died in situations like my grandpa experienced in war somehow don't add up to "fun" like the beautiful explosive displays are supposed to anymore.
You know, perhaps I simply struggle to comprehend time before or after me. Whatever the case, the idea that the farther one digs into history, the more likely history will reach up to hurt or leave its mark on that person is so compelling and disturbing. The farther one digs into something, the more real it becomes and the more one must come to terms with that story and one's own story. What if I research something someday and discover something awful? How will I face that? Will I treat it as a distant story, or will I try to understand it as something real? Will it so completely change my perspective that I have to change my life as well? Will I be able to change for it, or will I try to re-bury it? How brave am I? Sometimes it's all too clear that history is for the brave, and I'm not sure I'm capable of being one of them.
I finished the Historian last night. My mother-in-law sent it to me. It was a fun read. I'm not much for popular fiction in general--the only other recent popular works of fiction I've read in the last five years are the DaVinci Code and Harry Potter--but it won me over. I was pretty worthless this past week while I was reading it. It's good my grad apps were in. Kostova's writing style seems straight out of the Memory Keeper's Daughter, which I didn't appreciate much. (a bit too wistfully descriptive for my tastes, I guess, though I shouldn't point fingers as I often write similarly) Still, I really enjoyed the trans-generational, trans-continental, trans-religious "mysteries of the past" plot. I felt a bit like I was reading the DaVinci Code, though I'm hoping Kostova isn't crazy like Dan Brown is in real life. When it was done I wanted to know how much information she fabricated and how much she found in research. I'm not up on my vampire lore, much to the shame of my husband and in-laws, I'm sure.
In all of this, the thing the struck me the most was a quote near the beginning of the book about how history is palatable until you realize it happened. As a historian I've wrestled with this for quite a while. It's so interesting to read stories from the past, but it's easy to allow them to remain much like fairy tales in my mind. I find it hard to believe that Ghengis Khan, George Washington, and even my great grandparents ever truly existed. Logic tells me that they did. There are pictoral and literary records to prove they lived and breathed and walked around, but they aren't real to me. I find it truly terrifying to realize a historical event actually happened, especially negative ones. The Holocaust is sick and repulsive as an idea. It's mind-numbingly sickening when that moment of clarity hits me, and I realize it happened. This sick feeling is only partly due to my realization of humans as flawed beings, capable of horrible things. I get that. It's just that much worse to see it in your mind's eye at that moment when you realize it's not just a story. Even happy stories are terrifying on some level strictly because they happened and that means the bad happened, too.
My grandpa once told me about being sent out to string phone lines during WWII and being pinned down and shot by a sniper in the back. He was paralyzed when he woke up. He went through months of grueling rehab and regained the use of his limbs. When I knew him, the only things that alluded to that story were a scar on his back, a purple heart, and his disinclination for watching fireworks. When he told it, the story was sort of exciting. I know very little about my grandpa, and it was a window into his life. But one day it hit me that that actually happened. I imagined the fear, the mud, the pain. I was paralyzed in that moment, not by a bullet, like grandpa, but by my own terror. That memory still haunts me. I wasn't even there, but every time I think about it, I feel sick and scared. It's even started to hang at the edges of every fireworks display I watch. I remember the hushed way my mom explained to me that grandpa didn't want to come watch the fireworks because they hurt his ears--and he'd seen "real" fireworks. The millions of people who died in situations like my grandpa experienced in war somehow don't add up to "fun" like the beautiful explosive displays are supposed to anymore.
You know, perhaps I simply struggle to comprehend time before or after me. Whatever the case, the idea that the farther one digs into history, the more likely history will reach up to hurt or leave its mark on that person is so compelling and disturbing. The farther one digs into something, the more real it becomes and the more one must come to terms with that story and one's own story. What if I research something someday and discover something awful? How will I face that? Will I treat it as a distant story, or will I try to understand it as something real? Will it so completely change my perspective that I have to change my life as well? Will I be able to change for it, or will I try to re-bury it? How brave am I? Sometimes it's all too clear that history is for the brave, and I'm not sure I'm capable of being one of them.
Monday, February 9, 2009
You know it's been too long when...
people you work with start asking you to write letters of recommendation for their grad school apps. Yeah, that's when it hit me several months back that I had been where I am for a bit too long.
It's a strange dichotomy. On one hand, I'm flattered that people think I can get them into school and that my ever-so-humble opinion matters. On the other hand, WHAT THE HECK?!? I am not old enough or experienced enough to be doing that sort of thing, right? Apparently, I am old enough and experienced enough.
I have to say that overall the experience left me feeling washed up. I've been saying I'll go to school for four years, but I never apply. LHF is comfortable. I know it. I have friends there. I don't want to face the possibility of failing in a larger world, but if I stay here, I'll only feel more washed up. I know I can do more than LHF and that it's not a job I really love anymore.
Still...I remember the people in their late twenties who worked at LHF when I started. I looked up to them, but I didn't really expect to be one of them. I knew they weren't thrilled with the idea of staying at LHF much longer. It's that sort of place--the kind where you go to get a good start but that you'd feel awful for staying at too long because staying there means you're settling.
I walked into work last spring and said, I'm done here. I am. I'm done settling.
It's a strange dichotomy. On one hand, I'm flattered that people think I can get them into school and that my ever-so-humble opinion matters. On the other hand, WHAT THE HECK?!? I am not old enough or experienced enough to be doing that sort of thing, right? Apparently, I am old enough and experienced enough.
I have to say that overall the experience left me feeling washed up. I've been saying I'll go to school for four years, but I never apply. LHF is comfortable. I know it. I have friends there. I don't want to face the possibility of failing in a larger world, but if I stay here, I'll only feel more washed up. I know I can do more than LHF and that it's not a job I really love anymore.
Still...I remember the people in their late twenties who worked at LHF when I started. I looked up to them, but I didn't really expect to be one of them. I knew they weren't thrilled with the idea of staying at LHF much longer. It's that sort of place--the kind where you go to get a good start but that you'd feel awful for staying at too long because staying there means you're settling.
I walked into work last spring and said, I'm done here. I am. I'm done settling.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Doubt
Wednesday night I went to see "Doubt" at the Playhouse with Jimmy and Erin. I saw the movie in the theater last month and loved it. My head buzzed for hours afterwards thinking about who was right, who was wrong, how situations are affected by those in power, sexism, racism, etc. I was completely devastated by Viola Davis' performance as the mother. It's those times when you think you understand someone's perspective, and then you find out you have no idea about their lives and ideas that they really have. That scene was one of those moments. I'd never thought about having to chose between two kinds of abuse from two different powers. She knew for certain her husband would kill her son if provoked, and so she chose to allow her son to be with someone who might be sexually abusing him because that person was "there" for the boy--and wouldn't kill him. "It's only 'til June." I always want to know what the boy thinks about this. It's obvious he would chose Father Flynn over his father, but what is he thinking? And Sister Aloysius assumes that the mother will want to join her crusade to get rid of Flynn because the Sister sees this sexual abuse as so awful, but she has no idea about the boy's life outside of school. The sister is fighting for what she thinks is right, and the mother is fighting for the boy's life.
Anyway, the play was pretty good for community theater. The acting wasn't as strong, but the extra dialogue and the scenes that weren't in the play as compared with the movie also gave the play a completely different feel. The play's director allowed the actors to portray the story so that at the end I felt bad for Father Flynn and almost hated Sister Aloysius. In the movie, I'd felt more ambiguously about Father Flynn's guilt and Sister A's poorly shown good intent. Whatever the case, I don't know who's right and who's wrong. All I have are my doubts, which is probably the point.
Anyway, the play was pretty good for community theater. The acting wasn't as strong, but the extra dialogue and the scenes that weren't in the play as compared with the movie also gave the play a completely different feel. The play's director allowed the actors to portray the story so that at the end I felt bad for Father Flynn and almost hated Sister Aloysius. In the movie, I'd felt more ambiguously about Father Flynn's guilt and Sister A's poorly shown good intent. Whatever the case, I don't know who's right and who's wrong. All I have are my doubts, which is probably the point.
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