The real me is the woman in this window, manual typewriter in front of her but holding a pencil posed over paper. Deer nibble at shrubbery on snow-covered lawn, fodder both for her writing and for her life. Or are they the same thing? [Picture by illustrator Adrianne Blair in Faith Baldwin's Face Toward the Spring.]
[ad from Harper's Bazaar September 1942]
I'm all dressed up with no place to go.
Even put on my favorite chapeau.
No church, no theater,
No Frist Art Museum.
Can't visit Mamam and Papa,
Not in this world, dear me.
So I'll fly away to Paris
And join Armand and Reine-Marie.
I'm told they're wise as ever
Via mon cher Louise.
Home sweet home is nice for PJs and jeans,
But for really dressing up there's always Paree.
There aren't many cookbooks in my cookbook library that make me cry.
But I cry every time I read Nathalie Dupree's recipe for Mint Julep Meatloaf from her Matters of Taste cookbook, a cookbook of personal stories based on the 27 menus included in her early PBS show of the same name.
Nathalie Dupree, recently called by Garden & Gun magazine the Doyenne of Southern Cooking, started Rich's Cooking School in the large Atlanta department store in 1975 and her fifteenth cookbook was recently published. I have seven of her cookbooks that I use all the time.
Hers and Lee Bailey's would be the last cookbooks to go if ever forced to winnow down my collection to two authors. (That's my maternal grandfather in a snapshot by Lee's stack of cookbooks. He--my grandfather, not Lee--owned a butcher shop in the small town where my mother grew up.)
Matters of Taste is a book of personal stories along with recipes, some sad stories, some funny, and one for Cold Curried Tomato Soup that is the sexiest love story I've ever read in a cookbook. But her Mint Julep Meatloaf story makes my heart ache for every child who ever heard angry arguments between their parents, including my own children.
Her parents quarreled all the time when they were together. She thought her father was leaving them all soon. He always said he was going to...The little girl felt it was her fault that her parents constantly argued. If she left home her father might not leave...Her parents were still shouting when she left the house, and no one asked her where she was going...After a day of trying to find a house that looked like a new little girl might be wanted, she returned home...It was late when she walked in, and the heat of the day was gone. No one said hello. No one had missed her...Her dad left soon after and never came home again.
The little girl grew up and all her life believed that good food is a way to nourish people.
When she moved to another country, she served American meatloaf, macaroni, and greens to her exiled friends. When she was left alone, she cooked onions to comfort her in her loneliness. And always, she kept gingersnaps on hand and a jar of peanut butter. All of them, when she need them, soothed and comforted her.
To all the children who probably aren't getting off a school bus this fall of pandemic, may the cookie jar be full and their homes filled with love and laughter. To all their parents, here is the Doyenne of Southern Cooking's recipe for Mint Julep Meatloaf that she attributed to Charles Carden Snow. The recipe says to make two loaves; I've done that but this time just made one large one.
4 pounds lean ground meat [she uses 1/2 beef and 1/2 lamb but I use sirloin or very lean ground beef]
2 eggs, beaten slightly
1/8 teaspoon curry powder
1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 onion, chopped
1 beef bouillon cube, crushed
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 large handful fresh mint leaves, dried and crushed [I use fresh mint, slivered, not dried except in winter]
1 cup chili sauce [divided into 1/4 cups]
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup bourbon
Garnish: fresh mint leaves
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, F. Combine meat, eggs, curry, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, onion, bouillon, garlic, mint, and 1/4 cup of the chili sauce. Form the meat mixture into two thick, oval-shaped loaves. Pour the water into a greased baking dish that has a cover. Gently place the loaf into the dish. With a tablespoon, make a deep indentation down the center of each of the loaves. Combine the bourbon and 1/4 cup of the chili sauce and fill the indentations, pouring any remaining mixture over the loaves. Cover and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Uncover, spread each loaf with 1/4 cup of the remaining chili sauce, and bake uncovered until brown. Remove from pan. Garnish with mint leaves. Freeze one loaf and serve the other.
This meatloaf is a far cry from the dry onion soup mix meatloaf I grew up on. Mama's was good, almost any homemade meatloaf is, but I went on to two better recipes and now this one that we think tops them all. No need to get the ketchup bottle out for eating this meatloaf. The sauce is sensational!
Thank you so much to so many who emailed me that they understood my reasons for turning off comments here at this stage of my life.
Lately the world has been too much with me and in a desperate desire to find tranquility of mind and spirit, I'm pulling back my involvement in social media to a comfortable level. As a small part of this I'm suspending comments at both my blogs and, for an as yet undetermined time, will be posting only as a personal journal of my thoughts and interests.
[Tuppy thinks to herself] Seventy-seven. What had happened to the years? Old age seemed to have taken her unaware and totally unprepared. Tuppy Armstrong was not old. Other people were old, like one's own grandmother, or characters in books. She thought of Lucilla Eliot, in The Herb of Grace. The epitome, one would have thought, of a perfect matriarch.
from Under Gemini by Rosamunde Pilcher
I am now the same age as Tuppy and am examining how I want to spend the energy and hours I may have left. We live in unsettled times, to put it mildly, and owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to weigh how we want to spend precious time that will not always be there.
One thing I don't want to spend my hours on anymore is elevated stress following the political story of the day on Facebook, or, God forbid, ever again participating in what Mrs. Minerva called, "tedious and unprofitable discussion...clear from the outset that neither side was going to budge an inch."
Good grief, how such discussions drain one!
Tuppy refers to Lucilla Eliot as truly old and maybe I am too because I agree with Lucilla in one of my favorite books, The Herb of Grace (American title: Pilgrim's Inn):
Lucilla knew always...that it was homemaking that mattered. Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of each civilization depended upon their quality, and it was no good weakening oneself for the brick-making by thinking too much about the flood.
Elizabeth Goudge's The Herb of Grace/Pilgrim's Inn
I've come to realize that in this stage of my life I need to be careful to redeem the time (Ephesians 5:16). I will still try to see what's happening in my dear blog friends' lives during R & R time, how could I not? But I thought it only fair to warn you that I'm closing comments at both blogs in case you don't want to bother reading.
In order to have a few pictures here I'm including a recipe for one of my favorite seasonings, Quatre épices from James Beard's Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles. Note my own new truffle pig in the pictures!
Sending love and kisses to you! God bless and keep you!
Dewena
Do not be afraid, stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today...The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.
Exodus 14:13-14
When you have tired of being "arty" in your house bouquets, try a mille fleurs, after the manner of the mediaeval tapestry weavers. Before me as I write stands a modernistic brass vase...and in it a loosely jumbled bouquet of white, cerise, plum and pink Cosmos, lemon yellow and orange Calendulas, pale lavender and white Larkspur, purple Asters, mauve and white Scabiosa, and burnt orange Zinnias.
Richardson Wright in
The Gardener's Bed-Book
This year when I read it I decided to see what our garden had to offer.
Although the only flower I had that my favorite author listed was one burnt orange zinnia--and it was a volunteer...
And even though I didn't have a brass vase and had to use an old copper piece, I was pleased with how my own little mille fleurs turned out.
When I researched mille fleurs, that means "thousand flowers," I read that these were usually shown on green background, the flowers shown on European tapestries during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
My flower arrangement rests on top of a stack of old interior design books edited by Richardson Wright when he was editor-in-chief of House & Garden magazine. These are treasures to me that I lose myself in over and over.
I also own five other books written by my favorite author and my top literary crush, and they stay out all the time for me to read and study, line by line slowly, pages of notes written down.
I count Richardson Wright as a blessing in my life, sent from the early 20th century to me, especially for such a time as this.
How about you? Is there a special author who is your own Calgon, take me away blessing?
For five years I've saved this cover of Garden & Gun magazine's Aug/Sept issue, from their annual "The Southern Food Issue."
And each summer I wait until a nice person gives us homegrown tomatoes and then make a tomato sandwich, something that was a favorite of my father's. No, I don't use Duke's mayo for it; Hellman's is my brand.
This summer two nice people have kept us supplied with homegrown tomatoes and they've been a delicious part of my menus. We've only grown cherry tomatoes for years now; just no luck with any other kind.
I made a small pot of tomato sauce to freeze for pasta with a few that were extra ripe. You can see a couple of Trader Joe's products behind the bowl that are favorites of mine. RH just made his first visit to TJ's since before the shut down happened and he found almost everything on my long list.
Last July, Garden & Gun had an article about sterling silver tomato servers and I got out my only one and polished it up. The top one in their picture was valued at $500! Mine was much cheaper but pretty.
I use mine every time I make tomato aspic.
We've only had one good tomato so far off the one tomato plant our daughter planted for us but it was so good! I forgot to get a picture of it but I used it in a salad this week.
It was one of those nights when we were both exhausted. RH grilled two rib eye steaks that I'd smeared with brown sugar the night before and refrigerated uncovered [it seems to help]. I baked two large baking potatoes in the oven and added our lone tomato to the store-bought bagged salad.
That was it and we were almost too tired to eat. Almost.
There's an amazing tomato recipe I wanted to make this summer.
It's the Hot & Hot Fish Club's Tomato Salad and it looks magnificent!
Not sure I'm up to the challenge of this dish but if you are just Google it and take lots of pictures and let me know how it was.
Meanwhile, let's keep enjoying homegrown tomatoes as long as we can!
