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Beginning in 2018 "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries were also posted on Ruth's FACEBOOK page where her entries (usually weekly, on Sunday mornings) usually lead to lively conversations.

This Page: January - March 2025

VELVEETA, etc.

January 19, 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about melted cheese. In my post last week there was the Foothills café’s invitation to Raclette Night and I savored your raclette comments. In my binge-listening to Maisie Dobbs novels I recently finished the audiobook of A SUNLIT WEAPON and in it Maisie’s stepmother says to her, “I’ve made you a round of cheese on toast.”
Cheese on toast!  Immediately I was remembering Suffolk, England, our tiny galley kitchen in our Brandon Hall apartment, and a stove.  As I wrote in a July 2022 post, “I’ve written here before about my fondness for the small stove Don and I had in our apartment in England, with its little broiler pan under a burner. I could make cheese toasts so easily!”

I continued, “Years later I read S. Blyth Stirling’s very funny NAKED SCOTLAND: AN AMERICAN INSIDER BARES ALL; in it she wrote about “Things Scottish People Like,” with instructions about making “Cheese on Toast/Roasted Cheese/Toasted Cheese: Place thinly sliced cheddar on slices of bread and put it under the grill [broiler] until the cheese is bubbly and the bread is just slightly browned on the edges. It sounds so simple, but it’s the perfect comfort food for a chilly climate. It’s delicious on its own, but I highly recommend kicking it up a notch with Branston pickle (a pickled chutney). Leave it to the inventive Scots to get something so simple, so right!”

And now from the sublime to the—Velveeta. In the January/February issue of SMITHSONIAN magazine, a table-of-contents item got my attention: “Origins: Velveeta.” I flipped pages and reached:
“American Culture: How Emil Frey whipped up a smooth dairy sensation. By David Levine.” He writes, “The year was 1916, and Jacob Weisl, owner of the Monroe Cheese Company of Monroe, New York, had a problem. Some of the wheels of Swiss cheese made in his factory in Pennsylvania inevitably broke or were misshapen, leaving a plethora of bits and blocks of cheese that Weisl was desperate to salvage. He had this waste shipped back to Monroe, where the solution was concocted by one of his cheesemakers, a caseiculture genius named Emil Frey. On his home stove in Monroe, Frey spent two years tinkering. His breakthrough came in 1918, when he devised a new way to mix the cheese pieces with whey, the leftover liquid from milk curds, while adding an ingenious emulsifier to blend the fats and water . . . The result was a cheese that, when melted, became a smooth, velvety sauce. Frey dubbed it Velveeta—and it became an instant hit.”

In 1927 Kraft Foods took over and “soon changed the Velveeta recipe . . . crucially replacing real cheese, which has only three or four ingredients, with the paragraph of chemical elements that still graces the package today.

“In the 1930s and 40s, Kraft began marketing Velveeta successfully, if rather dubiously, as a health food and diet aid, and its low price and convenience—beloved by kids, shelf-stable, melts like a dream—charmed America’s homemakers throughout the suburban ’60s and beyond.”

And now I’ve returned in memory to that little stove’s broiler pan, melting cheddar.

  © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

January 1.
Plymouth Square Dance. Lift your spirits at the Barn on the Pemi tomorrow night. What better way to start off 2025? All details are on the attached flyer. Please share with your friends, neighbors, and any family members who still haven’t gone home! Experience a rousing good time in Plymouth with professional caller David Millstone, fiddler Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki, and pianist Sue Hunt!
[Ah, that brings back memories of high school, the only time I square-danced. As I wrote in THE CHEERLEADER, “ . . . today basketball was over for the gym classes and square dancing had begun. (Snowy) hated gym-class dancing. At a signal from the coach, the boys charged across the gym toward the girls, who were chattering lightheartedly to cover their anxiety . . . ” Bev had forgotten that there would be square dancing and had worn a straight skirt that “caused her great difficulties during dancing. It was wise to wear a full skirt . . . ”]

January 3.
Thoreau Comes to Sandwich, posted by Allan DiBiase. January 3, 1853, in Thoreau’s JOURNAL: “The air is thick and darkened with falling snow, and the woods are being draped with it in white wreaths. This is winter. They are putting on their white greatcoats.” Photo: January 3, 2000: Hazy snowfall in the woods.

January 3.
Anyone been ice skating? It looks like glass but is it safe? Would love any information, guesses, and experienced skater opinions. Have you been out? Looks like cold and clear for the next few days.

January 4.
Ice Conditions. Always proceed with caution and check thickness as conditions change. This is what I’ve gathered and hope it’s helpful but don’t sue me if you fall in! Also learned according to the Old Farmers Almanac the ice should be over       30 inches thick to safely hold a T-Rex! (See chart below.) Good advice not to go alone and to bring ice picks. [In the chart, “Squam Lake: Glassy and getting safer/thicker every cold day.” When Wanda and I drove past Squam on January 6th in ten-degree weather there was still open water in the bay.]

January 7.
The Foothills [the café in the village center]: Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Hello, Sandwich! Wowza. Feels like minus 2. But the Foothills is warming up with a couple of events to draw you out of your onesie wearable blanket. Or you can feel free to dine in your onesie wearable blanket. We’ve got no dress code. This Thursday at 6—Trivia with Ashley and Amelia. Reserve your team table now because we’re filling up. On Saturday, January 18th, we will be having another Raclette Night. Come and join us for French après ski whether you actually ski or not. Makes no difference to us. You just really need to like melted cheese. Every day is warm at The Foothills so come on over for soup and our incredible fireplace—on TV.

January 8.
Cold Feathered Friends. This Downy Woodpecker clung to the side of my window as if saying “Let me in, it’s freezing out!” It’s so cold that the heated birdbaths are freezing over! Holy Moly!
Photos: The Downy Woodpecker, birdfeeder in background, looking with interest into the window.

January 8.
Banjo gathering every other Thursday. Yes, we’re still gathering at the Sandwich town hall every other Thursday to play our banjos on our knees. 6:30 to 8. Simple easy no pressure—not a lesson, just a get-together to learn from each other and try some cool stuff.

[And now I’m humming “Oh! Susanna” and in my imagination I’m there with my five-string banjo, plucking.]

  © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

WORDS

January 5, 2025

                 When I saw the news about “polarization,” the Merriam-Webster 2024 “Word of the Year,” I thought about my own word of 2024. When the TV is on I’ve been listening throughout most of the year for a word that seems to have disappeared.
                 The word is “very.”
                 I listened and listened and listened—and all I heard was “super.”
                 The year was nearly over when on December 22nd on a Food Network baking competition a judge declared, “Super delicious” but followed it with, “and very well executed.”
                 After lamenting for months the death of “very,” I cheered and wished I could still do a cartwheel.
                 Also on the Food Network in December, some old-fashioned words were fondly remembered on “The Pioneer Woman” when Ree Drummond was cooking from an old recipe and said, “I love these old recipe terms—‘heaping,’ ‘scant,’ ‘pinch.’” Ah, yes! The words suddenly seemed beautiful to me and I was back in my mother’s pantry and my grandmother’s, reading food-stained cookbooks.
                 From these beautiful words my mind swerved to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “for a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be whistling or humming.” He thought that “Ode to a Nightingale” was unbearably beautiful and never could read it without tears in his eyes.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
     My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
     One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot.
     But being too happy in thine happiness—
         That thou, light winged Dryad of the trees,
               In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
     Singest of summer in full-throated ease . . .

And here’s the verse that mentions Ruth, which of course in my youth I memorized:
Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!
     No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
     In ancient days by emperor and clown;
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
     Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
          She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
               The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
     Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn . . .

From these beautiful words my mind swerved to nonsense words. At one time I tried memorizing Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” I learned that nonsense was harder than beautiful, at least for me.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
     And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
     The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the JubJub bird and shun
     The frumious Bandersnatch!” . . .

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
     Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
     He chortled in his joy . . .

My joy about hearing “very” has settled down and now I’m listening again, hoping to hear the word again.

     © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

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