fannie merritt farmer (1857-1915)

the other night, my mom and i discussed her letting me keep our “ump-teen”-years-old Drip-O-Lator (manufactured in massillon, OH) as long as i found a larger one online. now, this aluminum contraption is genius for easily making delicious coffee with no electricity (except, you know, boiling water). no fuss a-tall.

i was able to find a larger one from gloria’s treasures. here’s an example. i’ve been poking around this online store and loving all this classic dinnerware. yes, it’s true. i also like how gloria describes so many of her products as “SHINY IN AND OUT.” that’s exactly what i like to hear when buying some vintage stuff.

anyway, all this excitement got my mom and me talking about old pre-WWII era fannie farmer cookbooks. my mom’s mom had one from about 1936 and learned most of her cooking from it. i never knew my grandmother and i’ve been subsequently learning about her through her cooking. i guess she wasn’t a very good cook (“couldn’t cook her way out of a wet paper bag!” says my mom) because she roasted meat til it tasted like shoe leather and steamed veggies til they were mushy. but she did make a mean fresh orange icing (butter and powdered sugar, creamed, plus orange rind and fresh orange juice).

fannie farmer

(she was an aries)

our fannie farmer cookbook is from the 70′s or 80′s and you can tell which recipes are good cause those are the messiest pages (brownies, for sure). i guess what’s important about the pre-WWII era cookbooks is that they were published before rationing went into effect, which drastically changed how america cooked. there was also food rationing in WWI but mostly on meat and sugar. i wonder whether the u.s. would do well to ration now, to curb over-consumption of junky and high-calorie foods by the people who need them the least. rationing gas might also be a good idea, or taxing gas and using the tax to pay for public transportation development.

anyway, i’m on the hunt. and it’s really not that easy to find a fannie farmer cookbook from this particular time period. there’s a bunch from the 1990′s & after, and there’s a bunch of the original 1896 boston cooking-school cookbooks. fannie farmer was a graduate of the school and later published a collection of recipes she learned and perfected there. in this book she stressed the importance of exact measurements. no more of this “pinch” and “handful” business. she was called “the mother of level measurements” according to wikipedia, anyway.

farmer considered her most important work food and cookery for the sick and convalescent.

Overall, the book reveals Farmer‘s touching intimacy and sympathy for the invalid’s needs -something she knew firsthand. The invalid’s tray should be orderly, cheerful, with small portions in dainty china. A heart-shaped bread and butter sandwich will be eaten when the slice of bread and ball of butter would not. She writes: “Men and women are certainly but children of an older growth, which fact is especially emphasized during times of sickness and suffering.”

i like cookbooks from the early-to-mid 1900′s because there’s only about 50 ingredients used to make everything, there’s a focus on seasonable cooking, and i guess it reminds me of everything i’ve learned about cooking from my mom (never wash out a sifter, paprika goes rancid, iron frying pans are essential, never soak wood in water, how to “cut in” butter with two knives, real baking requires serious elbow grease…)

elbow grease–

humorous.

Vigorous rubbing, proverbially referred to as the best unguent for polishing furniture. Hence allusively, energetic labour of any kind.

1672 MARVELL Reh. Transp. I. 5 Two or three brawny Fellows in a Corner, with meer Ink and Elbow-grease, do more Harm than an Hundred systematical Divines with their sweaty Preaching.

(thanks, OED! you’re the best!)

the oxford english dictionary

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.            (Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 1922, p. 4).

while searching a few sites for a used book, i came across powells.com’s blog. there’s a contest to win a 20 volume set of the oxford english dictionary (i want this SO bad) and to enter, one submits an english word and the reason why it’s so good. check out the entries.

i’ll share some gems with you:

Kit November 30th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

My favorite word in the English language is YES. Nothing sounds better than hearing that word =)

Brian November 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am

Bullshit – It just cuts through so many other words.

Although I would like the OED so I can learn some others.

Paul M December 23rd, 2008 at 9:34 am

Tortfeasor – Sounds like the person is a villain from a comic book, which I guess is kinda true

rick s. December 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Rick – Not only is it my name, but it also means a pile of hay. Though I have never asked my parents, I have created my own back story as to how I was conceived, and eventually named. On a crisp autumn Iowa evening, as my parents drove home from eating a nice dinner and sharing a bottle of Chablis, the car broke down. On the way to a distant farm house, they stopped by a pile of hay and did what non-violent drunk parents do. Thereby creating me and my name. The probable reality is they had already seen the syndicated episode of MASH three times and were just rather bored, but a person can dream.

i miss the OED. at school, the library paid for a subscription to the online source and i could spend a few hours looking up a word, then looking up all the words around it, the literary quotes in which the word is used, its first appearances.

i wrote a paper in spring 2007 about the definitions and origins of the word “memory,” using the OED as a reference. here’s me getting all sci-fi:

The definition of memory has changed more recently due to the development of science. In psychology, memory has come to be defined as how the brain physically changes when a memory is formed. In the science of materials, substances are said to have memory. That is, a material may have a natural tendency to return to its original shape. Only in the past fifty years has the word “memory” been used when referring to technology and computers. A computer has the capacity to remember stored information. As this technological science progresses, it will be interesting to discover what effect this artificial memory has on the way humans remember things. If memory is also referred to as “recovering from unconscious,” could artificial memory be the means to an artificial consciousness?

that homework assignment led to the discovery of my favorite word:

mnemon, n. The minimum physical change in a brain, or other system, which constitutes the storage of a single piece of information in the memory; a unit of memory. (OED)

memory takes up space?! i mean i know about using the word memory as in a storage facility, but memories are not cards in a card catalog (wouldn’t that be a trip?). this concept blows my mind. in that same class, we read marcel proust’s remembrance of things past (or, a search for lost time, or, a la recherche du temps perdu), one of the best concept books i’ve certainly ever read. some people would say of all time. i’m not about to read the full 3,200 pages or whatever, but maybe one of these days. proust had really interesting ideas about space and time, involuntary (triggered by, say, a smell) vs. voluntary memory (trying your darnedest to remember this memory from way back when).

i’ll leave you with another quote from the memory assignment:

According to the Dictionary of English Language (1755), “Memory,..[is] Exemption from oblivion.”

a child of nurses, doctors and teachers

the kids i babysit are with their dad today until i don’t know when. so my day is kind of prematurely aborted. i finished the cat who ate danish modern and then talked to my dad about some writing he’s been doing.

my dad just finished his first semester in a nursing program, and being one of the only men, one of a few white folks, and the oldest person in the program, it’s been inspiring for me and others to see his progress and enthusiasm. there aren’t too many 50+ folks who would change careers with such zeal.

he worked like crazy this semester, taking 18 credits in a master’s program. i’m impressed by his diligence. my mom told me that in graduate school in the 70′s my dad would write over a dozen drafts of a paper. ocd? yes. he’s evened out since then except when it comes to, say, organizing the freezer. (i know where i get these habits…)

there are a few experiences that have really touched him and he says he wants to relate how it is to be a man in a nursing program, what men can contribute to nursing. i suggested he make a zine. it’s low-key, low-tech. he can get his ideas down on paper and out there without too much fuss. and it will be fun. i think he’s into it.

i did a genealogy report in middle school(?) and discovered just how full my family is of interesting nurses, doctors, professors and teachers. my mom’s dad wrote quite a few books on topics ranging from how black communities in the south could reduce hypertension through traditional methods of medicine rather than expensive doctors to how mining minerals affected the development of the soviet union. my mom’s brother was a journalist for newsweek during the vietnam war. he died there in an accidental bombing and was m.i.a. for about 20 years. my dad’s parents were both teachers and school administrators in new jersey public schools. my mom is a psychiatrist in the veteran’s hospital and, previous to nursing school, my dad worked for an insurance company researching injury prevention.

quite a list of helpers!

i like education, information technologies, publishing…i’ve lectured for several college classes on transgender issues [make another page about this]. i’m concerned about making sure radical, queer books stay in small public libraries. i like the idea of zine distribution as a form of personalized publishing. like, “oh, you need to get this information out to that group of people? on how small a budget? well, i have just the thing…”

also–a side note. there are two people my dad knows who have shifted careers in the most interesting way. one guy used to design car parts for nascar and, after helping to design a kind of neck brace, is now the one who just got his phd in psychiatric epidemiology, hoping to apply it to figure out how people can bounce back better from brain injuries. the other guy used to be a civil engineer and now he is a genetic engineer. i have a theory about connections between physical map-making and the process of fabricating a life story but that’s for another time…

found poems

there’s this short story i wrote during senior year of high school that’s semi-autobiographical and it seems to like hiding from me. so i was looking for that again–didn’t find it, but i found two poems instead.

the first is from february 26 2004. my sister and i “took care of” the house in massachusetts for my last year of high school. shit was crazy then and i felt like i was quietly spiraling out of control. to top it off, two months later we moved out of the house i knew so well. it was like a death. i thought i would include this as some kind of eulogy to 41 delmar. maybe i’ll write more about that house later.

I’m on the highway. I know when I get home tonight the house will be empty. Everyone seems to be away this weekend. For now, it’s just me and my car and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. The cigarette burns red like the taillights head of me. Behind me, headlights shift lanes and distract my eyes. I can feel the acid in my muscles.

At least my car behaves how I want it–just one determined swerve and they’d have to sift through the wreckage to find me.

I see the old exit sign up ahead. The radio sings something about fighting your battles all alone and a feeling I’m ashamed of flashes over my face.

Today a girl said it smelled like summer. She said it was like standing outside a restaurant in July. The frozen ground said otherwise, but I believed her. I took a greedy drink of the smooth air. I can’t ever remember February being so cold.

I speed into the left lane, but there is no hurry. By April, my childhood home will be full of moving boxes. What I’ll miss most is how the summer rain carries the sweeping sound of the highway across the lake and through my bedroom window.

the other poem is found from a collection of shorts stories called Descent of Man by T. Coraghessan Boyle, pg. 45. i wrote this in september 2003.

The dam.

Impossibly swollen, rain festering the yellow surface,
a hundred new streams a minute rampaging in,
the pressure of those millions of gallons
hard-punching those millions more.

There! the first gap,
the water spewing out,
a burst bubo.

And now the dam
shudders, splinters,
falls to pieces like

so much cheap pottery.