Real Pumpkin Pie
November 26th, 2011
There was a shortage of carving pumpkins this year, thanks to some inclement late summer weather. So for Hallowe’en this year I bought a pair of petite pie pumpkins to make Jack O’ Lanterns. Only I was too tired to carve them. They sat on my kitchen shelf for nearly a month before I decided to use them in a Thanksgiving pie.
This was the first time I’d ever used real pumpkins — not canned. According to the directions I found online, the first step was to cut the pumpkins open and scrape out the seeds and pulp.
I washed the seeds and put them aside to dry out and roast the next day.
Apparently it doesn’t really matter how you cook the remaining pumpkin flesh. Microwave, oven, or steamer. Steamer seemed the best choice in my tiny garret kitchen.
After about 20 minutes, the pumpkin was dark and soft and fragrant. As soon as the pieces were cool enough to hold, I scraped it off the skin.
It looked a little stringy at first, but after a good stir with the fork, voila!
I needed 2 cups of pumpkin (plus 1/2 cup brown sugar, 3 beaten eggs, 1/2 cup heavy cream, and spices to taste) for my pie filling. I had about 2 and a half cups in all, so I put the remainder away for later. I poured the mixture into my crust and . . .
Salt Prints
November 25th, 2011
The Museum where I work (and sometimes curate exhibits that include modern art) has featured photographs by artist Hal Hirshorn in three exhibitions: “Tending the Fires”, “Memento Mori: The Birth & Resurrection of Postmortem Photography”, and “In the Spirit: Modern Photographers Channel the 19th Century”. Working with an early 20th-century view camera fitted with a mid-19th century lens, Hirshorn uses 19th-century techniques, including Henry Fox Talbot’s salt printing process, invented in 1834.
This salt print is from Hirshorn’s series shown in “Tending the Fires.” It was taken two years ago in the kitchen of the Merchant’s House Museum. Others featured the same model — representing one of the Irish servants who once lived and worked in the house — cleaning the parlor grates. One of those photographs was published in the Historic House Trust newsletter, where a visiting historian saw it and marveled at how lucky the museum was to have original period photographs of its servants…
It was a natural mistake, given the atemporality of the image, though it is extremely uncommon to find photographs of servants dressed in their working clothes from the mid-19th century — even more rare to see one in the act of cleaning. I was particularly amused because I was the model portraying the servant. I made the dress I wore in less than three days, then sweated through an August heat wave in a corset and three petticoats while holding really, really still for the long exposures. Before the shoot, Hal brought over books of photographs by Arthur Munby, a British photographer who broke with his own social class to document 19th-century working women — most famously taking many photographs of Hannah Cullwick, a maid-of-all-work who was also secretly married to Munby.
Earlier this year, I — and lots of other people — participated in another series by Hal Hirshorn, this time recreating the death and funeral of Seabury Tredwell in 1865.
It was an incredible project, a production of prodigious proportions. Hirshorn shot in three historic locations, including the Merchant’s House Museum, Grace Church, and the New York City Marble Cemetery. There were 14 different models — some taking part in multiple shoots — each wearing some sort of mid-19th century mourning costume. The weather was less than cooperative. The final shoots had to be rescheduled thanks to hurricane Irene. An earlier shoot took place despite an impending rainstorm that let loose just as we were heading home. You haven’t lived until you’ve chased four men in top hats carrying a coffin down Broadway, while wearing a corset and a hoop skirt, in the middle of a torrential downpour.
If you’d like to see the funeral photographs in person, you’ve got three more days, until Monday, November 28, to visit the exhibit at the Merchant’s House Museum. Works by Sally Mann, John Dudgale, and RA Friedman are also on display, along with historic spirit photographs from Thomas Harris and The Burns Archive.
Last Thursday of November
November 24th, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope this finds you well fed and enjoying time with family or friends.
We all know that Thanksgiving is a celebration of the Pilgrims and their first successful harvest (thanks in large part to the friendly Native American Indians who helped them). But have you ever wondered why we celebrate it on the last Thursday in November? Especially since that’s not when historians think the Pilgrims’ original Thanksgiving actually took place?
Illustration by Frank Leslie, from a collection of his Civil War illustrations published in 1896 (from Clip Art Etc.)
It’s all due to Sarah Josepha Hale, the editrix of popular woman’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. She spent more than a decade writing editorials and agitating for the official adoption of the Thanksgiving holiday. Here’s an excerpt from her 1861 harangue, I mean plea:
“The way is already prepared; for the last ten years or more the idea of our American national Thanksgiving has been gradually growing in favor and becoming an observance in all our States and Territories. The last Thursday in November has thus been known as the American Festival Day, and for the last three years has been observed by Americans in European cities and wherever our countrymen could meet together. It has been kept on board our fleets in the Mediterranean, African, and Brazilian stations; our missionaries in India, China, Africa have approved of this festival, and last year it was observed by our countrymen in Japan. Hon. Townsend Harris, American ambassador to that empire, inclosed in a letter to us his proclamation setting apart, in conformity with American custom, the last Thursday in November as a day of public Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
Until S. J. Hale began her campaign, the American feast of Thanksgiving had been celebrated unofficially on different dates in different places for centuries. Official declarations of the holiday had been limited to single occurrences. She was finally able to declare victory when President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a permanent national holiday in 1863. It was hoped that the new holiday might help bring peace to the Civil-War-torn nation.
I just did the math: this year, America celebrates her 148th Thanksgiving. Hurrah for Sarah Josepha Hale! Hurrah for Abraham Lincoln! Hurrah for the Pilgrims!
As the sign outside the restaurant that took over the old punk rock club CBGB in NYC says, “Gobble Gobble Hey!”*
*Apologies to anyone who doesn’t get this joke.
Found in the Closet
November 23rd, 2011
While cleaning out my bedroom closet, I came across a bag I’d forgotten to sort. My mother delivered it last year, I think from my Auntie Mary but maybe from my Gram. It contained a fascinating assortment of mid-20th century treasures.
Three sets of plastic sock needles.
Garish plastic buttons.
A fat quarter of palm-tree printed fabric.
“Zip Her” — a gadget for closing your own dress from behind.
Printed hankies.
Black gloves with buttons, alas way too small to fit my unnaturally long fingers.
Wooden things, including two (on the right) that seem to be for darning, and (on the left) a barbell.
There were two other things in the bag, but they are so monumentally “cool” that I am saving them for individual posts.
Fraternizing with the Enemy
November 22nd, 2011
I just watched the most amusing film, in which (I kid you not):
Kirk Douglas saves an entire wagon train and a US Army fort by sleeping with an Indian.
Naturally the Indian was played by an Italian. The bad guys were Walter Matthau and Lon Chaney, Jr. And Kirk Douglas proved that he always looks a little bit like a pirate, no matter what he wears.
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