Ruth Doan MacDougall: "Ruth's Neighborhood"

2020 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved 

   SUPPORT SYSTEMS, CONTINUING

September 20, 2020

               In August 2016, I wrote here about household problems, quoting Bev in Snowy when she says that everything in her household seems to be causing “disaster after disaster. The major ones were, the water heater sprung a leak, a stove burner caught on fire . . . the washing machine broke down, and Etta’s horse fell in the swimming pool!”
               Two years later, a month after Don died, I wrote here about how household problems “became my responsibility when Don’s health began failing. I started to assemble what I thought of as a ‘support system’ for our house. Oh, how spoiled I had been by the luxury of Don’s being able to fix almost everything! And for the times when he knew he needed help, either with our house or one of the places we looked after in our little caretaking business, he had assembled people who were his support system, who came to the rescue.”
               I concluded, “My support-system people have also been coming to the rescue. For example, here’s what was happening one recent busy day: the carpenter was retiling our shower; the plumber dashed in to fix the kitchen faucet; and the handyman arrived to investigate a smoke-alarm problem.”
               During that time I learned there was another support system, that of family and friends. We’re all learning the importance of this during the pandemic, aren’t we.
               Last week I thought more than ever about support systems. My niece came for a visit, after visiting my stepmother in northern New Hampshire and before visiting my sister in Maine—a loving tour of her aging relatives! Her support ranged from help with computer problems to the cooking of wonderful meals for the table and for the freezer, and there was lots and lots of laughter.
               Then after her visit, I went out to lunch with three dear friends from our high-school “Gang.” We try to get together each autumn. Masked, we did so this year, meeting at the Village Kitchen restaurant I’ve mentioned often here. Ah, the comfort of shared references, such as other friends’ names, Laconia’s street names, this and that, then and now; we knew what each other meant.
               Also, of course, shared memories. I particularly enjoyed this: We were talking about 1950s clothes, and two of us said, “Remember pink shirts? Remember Don’s pink button-down shirt and chinos, and white bucks?” and “Wasn’t he handsome!” (I must point out that I was not the one saying that, so it was a very objective opinion!) And we all sighed happily, reminiscently.
               The support systems continue.

“THE 85 BEST THINGS TO DO IN NEW ENGLAND"

September 13, 2020

            This is the 85th anniversary of Yankee magazine, and in the September/October issue one of their features is a list of “The 85 Best Things to Do in New England.” I turned to this immediately, hoping that I’d done some of them.
            Yes! I counted up twenty-six. Here are some of my favorites:
            “Buy L.L.Bean Boots at their birthplace”: I grew up with L.L.Bean catalogs ever-present in the house, my father studying them, now and then making a decision. If you ordered boots, you had to trace your feet on a piece of paper and send that. What a great occasion when his boots or fishing gear arrived! Years later, on a fishing trip in Maine, he finally went to the actual store, back when Freeport hadn’t yet become an outlet-malls mecca. Don and I had bought our first Bean boots by mail, tracing our feet, but we were so impressed by his description of the store that when we made our next trip to Maine we too went—and were so overwhelmed by the array that we ended up only buying a bandana! (In years since, needless to say, we have bought rather more there, including Bean boots.)
            “Survey the Maine Coast through the Eyes of a Sailor”: By taking a trip on a windjammer. Don and I did this in the 1990s, on a small windjammer, spending a night in a harbor near the island of North Haven. It was this tall ship’s first trip of the season, sort of a shakedown cruise, and we were the only passengers, which made it seem extra-adventurous. I remember most vividly the cook. This young woman, who hadn’t worked on a ship before, was nervous but confident, and she fed us and the crew fine meals from her little galley.
            And speaking of meals, the 43rd Best Thing in the list is “Eat Like a New Englander” and begins, “New England’s most iconic foods—chowder, baked beans, blueberry pie, and the like—are more than mere items on a bucket list. They’re edible artifacts, telling stories of immigration, history, and agriculture.” For blueberry pie, one of the recommendations is Helen’s Restaurant in Machias, Maine. This is another place we heard about from my father, the pie and the view, after a fishing trip had included a stop at Helen’s.  He reported happily that you could look out the window beside your table right down into the Machias River. So Don and I did the same the next time we were in Maine.
            “Reconnect with the Revolution”: the American revolution, “and for maximum fife-and-drum drama it’s impossible to beat Minute Man National Park in Massachusetts.” In an old family photo album there’s a photo taken on the Lexington town green, which is guarded by a Minute Man statue, with me holding a balloon by its string. Each April our family went down to Lexington, my mother’s hometown, to visit my grandparents and go to the Paul Revere Day (now Patriots’ Day) celebration. What always made the biggest impression on me was how far Lexington’s April had advanced into what Snowy would call “the green and yellow time,” while in New Hampshire our spring was still more a bedraggled brown.
            And (food again), next-to-last but definitely not least on the eighty-five list: “Whoopie It Up: Any whoopie pie is a good whoopie pie; that said, make a point to seek out the Ghiradelli chocolate version at Moulton Farm in Meredith, NH.” Oh, yes!

   DESSERT SALADS ?!

September 6, 2020

             Noting that “I think Snowy would love this!”, a friend sent me a printout of a piece by Sheri Castle titled “The History of the Strawberry Pretzel Salad.” 
             A what salad??? Strawberries and pretzels could be called a salad? Avidly I read on: “Yes, it’s a dessert, and yet it’s called a salad, which is the way of many vintage recipes that call for a little (or a lot) of Jell-O. Many culinary historians think it started way back in 1904 when Mrs. John E. Cook of New Castle, Pennsylvania, won third prize (a new sewing machine!) for her perfection salad—a congealed raw vegetable number—in a recipe contest . . . The term salad seems to have stuck, even when a misnomer. I grew up eating strawberry pretzel salad in North Carolina . . .  There are a lot of desserts that call themselves salads—the cookie salad, the ambrosia salad, the candy bar apple salad—but strawberry pretzel salad is the queen of them all.”
             And as I continued to read on, I learned that this salad starts out with a pretzel crust—a what??? Yes; “Using pretzels instead of the usual graham cracker crumbs was a real aha moment back when few home cooks thought of using a little salt to balance a sweet dish.” Then there’s a filling of cream cheese, sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla. Then a topping of strawberry Jell-O and fresh strawberries. Most recipes, I was told, use Cool Whip and frozen strawberries, but she advises against this.
             Well! I was reeling with amazement. At least I had read recipes before for ambrosia salad—and had I actually made it in my young-married years? I seemed to recall that its main ingredients were bananas and shredded coconut. Shredded coconut might’ve been beyond my budget.
             And then soon after I had received this strawberry-pretzel recipe, I was cleaning house with the Food Network when I heard the words “candy bar salad” and spun around to stare at Girl Meets Farm on the screen. I beheld Molly Yeh saying, “It’s a Midwest specialty, and it’s really a dessert,” as she began making the candy bars from scratch. After they’d solidified in the fridge, she chopped them up and combined them with vanilla pudding, whipped cream, and chopped apples. I decided it was the apples that qualified this dessert to be a salad—and healthy.
             And I was inspired to get out a cookbook from the past to see if any Dessert Salads were included. It’s my grandmother Ruth’s copy of the Lend-a-Hand Cook Book put together by her church’s Lend-a-Hand group. She had contributed several recipes and, leafing through, I was momentarily sidetracked by her recipe for “Corn Cake,” remembering all the cornbread I’d enjoyed in her kitchen. She hadn’t contributed any Dessert Salads. But, to my delight, in the salad section I found that one of the women had supplied a recipe for a perfection salad such as the one that won third prize in the 1904 contest and in the desserts section a frozen fruit salad appeared.
           I told my sister and niece about strawberry pretzel salad. We’ll be making it sometime, and they agreed with my friend that Snowy would love it.

          Last week another of New Hampshire’s WMUR New Hampshire Chronicle segments got my complete attention. It was about the annual New Hampshire Poutine Festival, which somehow I hadn’t heard about ever before. I learned that usually the host is the Franco-American Centre of New Hampshire in Manchester, but this year it became a road show with restaurants from Nashua north to Littleton participating.          
          In case you haven’t encountered “the French-Canadian classic” poutine (pronounced pouTEEN), I should explain that it’s a dish made up of French fries, cheese curds, and gravy. Who wouldn’t love these ingredients—but maybe (we timid folks wonder) not all together all at once? Don and I hadn’t heard about it in our youth, and the first time we saw “poutine” on a menu was in a restaurant in Vermont near the Canadian border. We were curious, asked the waitress what was in it, and then didn’t dare try it because Don had had heart surgery a few years earlier and we were being very careful. But years later when we saw it on the menu of a new restaurant in the Laconia area we were more casual, ordered it, and laughed a lot while devouring it.
          The restaurants in the Poutine Festival Road Show have some variations on the theme of the three basic ingredients, such as adding chicken and peas, or maple syrup and bacon, or even duck confit!
          A French-Canadian dish that we had heard about from Laconia friends in our youth was a meat pie called tourtiere but pronounced TOOT-kay as in “Tootsie Roll.” In recent years, Don and I would occasionally treat ourselves to the meat pie from nearby Moulton Farm’s farm-stand bakery and we also made it several times ourselves. We used my niece’s paternal grandmother’s recipe. I gave this recipe to Bev in The Husband Bench and named it “Memere’s Tourtiere a la Bev.”
          A P.S. to last week’s excerpt from Sandy Oliver’s column: I thought from your interest that you’d like to read more of her “wilted lettuce” history: “Cooked lettuce historically found its way into soups, too, especially ones for fast days, like this one from Hannah Glasse, 1747, entitled ‘soop meager,’ but hardly meager with butter, onions, celery, spinach, parsley, and ‘a good Lettice cleanly washed,’ and water for broth, thickened with a little flour, dry bread crumbs, and seasoned with pepper and mace, then finished with beaten egg yolks and a dash of vinegar. If you have green peas, you can add them. If you aren’t fasting, use chicken broth.”
          Lettuce Soup rang a bell in my memory. Had I ever made it or just read a recipe? I checked my facsimile edition of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, copyright 1896, and there it was. I hadn’t made it, but it’s fun to read:
Cream of Lettuce Soup
2 ½ cups White Stock [made with “knuckle of veal” or chicken]
2 heads lettuce, finely cut
2 T. rice
½ cup cream
¼ T. onion, finely chopped
1 T. butter
Yolk 1 egg
Few grains nutmeg
Salt 
Pepper
Cook onion five minutes in butter, add lettuce, rice, and stock. Cook until rice is soft, then add cream, yolk of egg slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Remove outer leaves from lettuce, using only tender part for soup.

© 2020 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

  AGATHA CHRISTIE’S 100th ANNIVERSARY 

August 30, 2020

          In Publishers Weekly’s August 3rd issue, there was an article titled “In the Study, with a Typewriter,” by Liz Scheier. It’s about a milestone for Agatha Christie:
          “This year is the 100th anniversary of Christie’s debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the book that introduced Hercule Poirot—or, as an ad that ran in the Nov. 6, 1920, issue of PW called him, ‘a new type of detective in the shape of a Belgian.’ Poirot and a later Christie creation, amateur sleuth Miss Marple of fictional St. Mary’s Mead, became household names, and even a global pandemic can’t stop the grand doyenne of crime fiction. ‘We’re selling more than usual, even though many bookshops are closed,’ says James Prichard, who is chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Ltd. and Christie’s great-grandson. ‘People return to beloved childhood books in times of crisis. There’s a sense of justice in her books, and you know that things will be tied up at the end, which is reassuring.’”
          Childhood books. As the article goes on to say, “Many Christie fans started reading her early and were hooked for life.” In January 2018 I wrote here about Agatha (I feel I can call her by her first name!) and quoted The Cheerleader’s description of Snowy’s bedroom: “In this pink-and-white room, childhood blended into girlhood . . . In her white bookcase were the Five Little Peppers and Bobbsey Twins and Honeybunches and Maidas, but there were also more recent birthday-and-Christmas-requested books . . . and books she herself had bought, paperback Agatha Christies . . . ”
          I also quoted Andrew Wilson in a PW interview about his series in which a fictional Agatha Christie solves crimes: “I’ve always been a fan. She was a transition between the reading of my childhood and more adult literature.” I continued, “A transition. Yes! I vividly saw myself on my bed in my pink-and-white bedroom reading my first Agatha Christie, my mother’s copy of Three Blind Mice and Other Stories. Then all of my mother’s other Agatha Christies.”
          I mentioned this 100th anniversary to Penny, my sister, and we agreed that our favorite Agatha Christies are two Miss Marple mysteries, Murder at the Vicarage and The Body in the Library. When I was writing Site Fidelity I had a grand time deciding that the summer theater Bev had just joined would include Murder at the Vicarage in its performances. Being a newcomer, Bev shouldn’t get the Miss Marple role, so I settled on her getting the role of Mrs. Price Ridley who, Snowy recalls from reading the book, is a “matronly parishioner who wore matronly hats.” Thus Bev came up with her version of such a hat.

POUTINE AND POSTSCRIPT

August 23, 2020

          Last week another of New Hampshire’s WMUR New Hampshire Chronicle segments got my complete attention. It was about the annual New Hampshire Poutine Festival, which somehow I hadn’t heard about ever before. I learned that usually the host is the Franco-American Centre of New Hampshire in Manchester, but this year it became a road show with restaurants from Nashua north to Littleton participating.
          In case you haven’t encountered “the French-Canadian classic” poutine (pronounced pouTEEN), I should explain that it’s a dish made up of French fries, cheese curds, and gravy. Who wouldn’t love these ingredients—but maybe (we timid folks wonder) not all together all at once? Don and I hadn’t heard about it in our youth, and the first time we saw “poutine” on a menu was in a restaurant in Vermont near the Canadian border. We were curious, asked the waitress what was in it, and then didn’t dare try it because Don had had heart surgery a few years earlier and we were being very careful. But years later when we saw it on the menu of a new restaurant in the Laconia area we were more casual, ordered it, and laughed a lot while devouring it.
          The restaurants in the Poutine Festival Road Show have some variations on the theme of the three basic ingredients, such as adding chicken and peas, or maple syrup and bacon, or even duck confit!
          A French-Canadian dish that we had heard about from Laconia friends in our youth was a meat pie called tourtiere but pronounced TOOT-kay as in “Tootsie Roll.” In recent years, Don and I would occasionally treat ourselves to the meat pie from nearby Moulton Farm’s farm-stand bakery and we also made it several times ourselves. We used my niece’s paternal grandmother’s recipe. I gave this recipe to Bev in The Husband Bench and named it “Memere’s Tourtiere a la Bev.”
          A P.S. to last week’s excerpt from Sandy Oliver’s column: I thought from your interest that you’d like to read more of her “wilted lettuce” history: “Cooked lettuce historically found its way into soups, too, especially ones for fast days, like this one from Hannah Glasse, 1747, entitled ‘soop meager,’ but hardly meager with butter, onions, celery, spinach, parsley, and ‘a good Lettice cleanly washed,’ and water for broth, thickened with a little flour, dry bread crumbs, and seasoned with pepper and mace, then finished with beaten egg yolks and a dash of vinegar. If you have green peas, you can add them. If you aren’t fasting, use chicken broth.”
          Lettuce Soup rang a bell in my memory. Had I ever made it or just read a recipe? I checked my facsimile edition of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, copyright 1896, and there it was. I hadn’t made it, but it’s fun to read:

Cream of Lettuce Soup
2 ½ cups White Stock [made with “knuckle of veal” or chicken]
2 heads lettuce, finely cut
2 T. rice
½ cup cream
¼ T. onion, finely chopped
1 T. butter
Yolk 1 egg
Few grains nutmeg
Salt 
Pepper
Cook onion five minutes in butter, add lettuce, rice, and stock. Cook until rice is soft, then add cream, yolk of egg slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Remove outer leaves from lettuce, using only tender part for soup.

PANDEMIC LISTENING AND READING

August 16, 2020