When cleaning house

Ah, spring! The daffodils are blooming, the grass is green, the air is crisp, the snow is falling...

Yes. Although it's the end of March, New England thinks it's still time to throw down a healthy mix of snow and rain. What a dirty trick, after 70-degree weather a few weeks back.

No matter. Spring has a sense of newness about it, a feeling of being able to start over again. Maybe that's why I got the urge to clean house recently. After a few weekends of hosting friends, dashing down to D.C. to meet fiances, and preparing to lead an upcoming field trip, I was ready for a quiet couple of days at home.

So last weekend I decided to hold a mini-spring cleaning in my apartment. I swept out all the nooks and crannies, discovered that my baseboards do indeed collect dust, and wiped down my sinks and dish rack. I took my winter clothes to the dry cleaner's and washed three loads of laundry. Then I settled down to all that schoolwork that still awaited me. By the end of the weekend, I was exhausted, but my apartment looked better for it.

But like the last time I deep cleaned the apartment, I started wondering what spring cleaning had been like before women had washing machines and vacuum cleaners. So I turned to Maria Parloa's Young Housekeeper (1894) once again. She didn't disappoint.

Miss Parloa introduced her chapter on seasonal cleaning with the following:

"The season of house-cleaning is greeted with different degrees of welcome, or horror, by the different members of the family."

Sounds intimidating, right? Well, with good reason. Miss Parloa goes on to describe in great detail how to clean the various rooms of the house. Here's a paraphrased list (with commentary):

1. Wait until you don't have to light daily fires for warmth (so you can clean the furnace and stove). I guess March is not really the time to start.

2. In the cellar, remove the cinders from the furnace, then clean the whole furnace in pieces. Sweep the whole room (including the ceiling!), then whitewash the walls. I am so glad I live in an apartment.

3. In each room, brush and wipe all storage boxes and closets, then saturate with naphtha to keep out bugs. Line each box with new paper before replacing the stored goods. I suppose I moved some of my winter clothes to storage boxes...but since I'd recently cleaned all of them in the January moth scare, this was as far as it got.

4. Brush down the furniture, then place outside the room. You wouldn't want the furniture to get dirty!

5. Brush down the walls, ceiling, and windows of each room. Sweep the floor, wash the windows, woodwork, and the floor. Let dry for an hour, then replace all the furniture.

6. To clean carpets, remove the carpet tacks with a tack-lifter, then roll up the carpets in old sheets. Take the carpets outside and beat them on both sides, then let them lie on the grass until the room is ready. I don't even know where to start with this one. I guess carpets were held down with tacks before the days of rubbery carpet liners--that makes sense. But tack-lifters? You need a whole different tool just to pick up the carpets?

7. Clean the floor of each room once the carpet has been removed. Sprinkle the floor with wet sawdust, then sweep it up. Clean all surfaces with a broom covered with flannel. Wash the floors with lime water to make the floorboards "whiter and sweeter." Parloa also includes a recipe for making your own lime water (unslaked lime and water). This is getting awfully serious, friends. I am suddenly grateful that there are companies who spend all their time making cleaning products so I don't have to.

8. In bedrooms, take each bedstead apart. Pour naphtha into the grooves of each piece to prevent bedbugs. Dip the ends of slats into a bowl of naphtha. The only time I plan on taking my bedstead apart is when I move. That thing is tricky.

9. When you replace the carpet, rub the soiled spots with naphtha and flannel. Then wipe the carpet with ammonia water (that you have also made yourself). How did these people not die of naphtha poisoning?

10. Repeat appropriate steps for downstairs rooms, and make sure to beat the draperies. Good Lord. We're only halfway done?

11. In the kitchen and pantry, remove all china and dishes from the cupboards, and wash and dry the shelves. Cover with new paper. Scour the tinware, tables, and sink. This is a little more like what I did last weekend...but it's pretty much the only similarity.

Then, when the young housekeeper is finished cleaning the house, Parloa also recommends that "the piazza and yard should be put in order." At that point, were any of them still standing? No wonder she recommends hiring extra help for the week (week!) of spring cleaning. I'm not sure how anyone could manage that by herself, much less keep the meals going for the rest of the family. Apparently whole families tended to dread spring cleaning because the woman of the house would be so harried, and because she could only provide cold meals (if anything). Poor husbands.

The moral of this story is practically banging me over the head. Thank goodness for modern conveniences, and for the fact that we don't have to worry about bugs to the extent that 19th-century families did. It's fun to read between the lines for details like that: dust seems to have been a big issue, too, given the sweeping of walls and ceilings. I'm guessing soot from the furnace and gas lamps would have built up in the house as well.

Now I'm curious to hear about your spring cleaning. What have you done (or what are you planning to do) to get ready for spring? Hopefully no one's going to haul out their tack-lifter...

Williamsburg veal partridges

Some days are just full of questions. Like, why aren't there more movies like Back to the Future? Why do my students all wear feather extensions in their hair? If I walk around a lot while I teach, does that count as the day's exercise? Why is my dwarf hamster still afraid of everything that moves? And when were toothpicks invented?

I promise there's a reason for that last one.

Last week I made veal partridges, a dish which is a mystery in itself. Why call it "partridges" when the only meat involved is veal? I think it has something to do with the way the dish looks once assembled:

See, you roll up thin strips of veal and stuffing, then secure the rolls with toothpicks inserted crosswise. The resulting meat looks a little like partridges (or any bird) that have been trussed for roasting. Personally, I thought they looked more like pigs in a blanket, but I had a pretty good feeling those hadn't been invented yet in colonial America.

I also had a pretty good feeling that toothpicks hadn't been invented yet in colonial America.

{you probably couldn't buy toothpicks in a store}

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by the answer to that question. Turns out that people have probably been using toothpicks since they first got food stuck in their teeth. However, these early toothpicks were found or whittled from bigger pieces of wood, and it wasn't until the mid-19th century that toothpicks were first mass-produced the way we know them today. (For more on the "glorious" toothpick, check out this article.)

So, jury's out on how historically accurate these veal partridges are. They may have been secured with little spikes of wood, but it's more likely that a cook would tie them in bundles with a piece of string. Still, they're quite tasty, which is really all that matters at the end of the day, right?

Williamsburg Veal Partridges

(adapted from The Williamsburg Book of Cookery)

half an onion, chopped

3 tbsp butter, divided

one piece of bread, diced or shredded into crumbs

salt & pepper

1/4 tsp thyme

1/4 tsp sage

1 tbsp milk

5-6 thin slices of veal

1/4 cup flour

Preheat the oven to 300 F. Melt 1 tbsp butter in a pan and brown the chopped onion for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, assemble the stuffing: mix the bread crumbs, herbs, and salt and pepper to taste in a medium bowl. Add the onion and mix well, then moisten with the milk.

Lay out the veal strips and spread them with the stuffing. Carefully roll up the veal and stuffing to make rolls, and secure with two toothpicks stuck crosswise. Roll each veal bundle in flour.

Melt the other 2 tbsp butter in the pan and cook the veal rolls in the butter until browned. Place the rolls in a baking dish, along with any unused stuffing, and pour the fat over the veal. Cover the baking dish and bake for 40 minutes. Serve with brown rice.

Old Virginia batter cakes

Language is such a powerful tool. You can learn so much about the writer, about a different culture, or about a past time just through the words the writer chooses. As a history teacher, I end up thinking about this a lot, especially when we're looking at primary sources in class. Of course, it's hard to get my students to appreciate this; they spend most of their time wondering why Thomas Jefferson didn't capitalize his letters and what the word "scission" means.*  But all that unconventional spelling, those weird word choices, they help you imagine the time period in a way that other tools just can't.

One of my favorite historical novels, A Northern Light, tells the story of Mattie, a girl growing up in the Adirondacks in 1906. She wants to be a writer, but it's hard to stand up for what she wants when she's expected to look after her sisters. The author, Jennifer Donnelly, puts you immediately in Mattie's shoes with strong, vivid words:

"When Mamma was alive, she could make breakfast for seven people, hear our lessons, patch Pa's trousers, pack our dinner pails, start the milk to clabbering, and roll out a piecrust. All at the same time and without ever raising her voice. I'm lucky if I can keep the mush from burning and Lou and Beth from slaughtering each other."

Trousers. Mamma and Pa. Dinner pails. Clabbering. You don't just know it's 1906, you feel it with those words.

But really, what the heck is "clabbering," anyway?

"Clabbering" means curdling milk. Cooks would use "clabber," or curdled milk, the same way we use buttermilk today: to create a tender crumb in baking or to lend a tangy taste. Back in the day when people got their milk fresh from cows instead of fresh from the supermarket, raw milk would naturally curdle when left out. You can still do that today, of course, but most of us can only access pasteurized milk, which will only sour when left out.

So if you're, say, reading an old recipe for pancakes from colonial Williamsburg, and it happens to call for clabber, you're more than welcome to substitute some buttermilk. You'll still get the same light texture, and you won't have to worry about germs.

And that's what I mean about language: not only do the words themselves provide a window into a different time, but the meaning behind them also shows you the daily rituals of the past. Cooking techniques used for centuries by women who had to milk the cow if they wanted to bake for their families. Techniques that we've mostly forgotten about thanks to the magic of mass-produced meals, pasteurization, and industrially modified food.

The pancakes, by the way? Delicious. Tender, tangy, and just substantial enough thanks to the addition of cornmeal. Since there's no sweetener in the cakes themselves, they're more versatile than modern-day pancakes: equally excellent with a salad for dinner or with maple syrup for breakfast.

Old Virginia Batter Cakes
(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

2 large eggs
2/3 cup buttermilk
2/3 cup water
2/3 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour, plus more if needed
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
butter for the pan

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs until frothy. Add the buttermilk and water and whisk to combine; whisk in the cornmeal, flour, and salt. Let stand. Meanwhile, brush a griddle or frying pan with butter and set over medium heat. Just before you start cooking the pancakes, stir the baking soda into the batter. If the mixture is too thin, add flour by tablespoons until thick enough.

Working in batches, fry the pancakes in the heated pan, using about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake. When the pancakes have set and bubbles have formed in the middle (about 1 1/2 minutes), flip and cook another 30 seconds to 1 minute. Serve with savory or sweets according to your fancy.


* True story: I had this conversation today with my 9th graders.

Turnip tops

What is it about being on vacation? You sleep better. You get to spend long hours reading or flipping through magazines. You go for long, chilly walks. You actually crave vegetables for lunch instead of pizza.

For me, the first three all lead to the last. Because I'm more mindful of my habits and what my body wants, because I sleep as long as I need to instead of as long as the time available, because I have the luxury of time to just be. I look less to food for immediate comfort, and so I start eating salads and soups, and in the end I feel even better.

Funny how it's all interrelated, isn't it?

This week, while I'm on February break, I've been focusing more on incorporating vegetables into every meal--it seems easier to do it while I have the time and energy to shift my eating habits. So a few days ago I tossed up a big salad with fennel and tomatoes and red onion, and boiled some turnip greens as a historical side dish.

That's the thing about colonial vegetables (or "Garden Stuff," as the Williamsburg author likes to put it). There's not a whole lot that women did to alter them from their natural state. Sure, they could boil the heck out of vegetables and serve them up with a nice butter sauce, or mash up the boiled veggies with butter and cream, but they tended not to do much else. It's a stark difference from more modern-day recipes, which ask you to saute blanched kale with chorizo and drizzle a nice honey vinaigrette over the finished product, or toss roasted cauliflower with a garlic-orange sauce. (Both are delicious, by the way.) So colonial vegetables are not that exciting, and they probably don't maintain the nutritional value of just-picked greens (thanks to all that boiling). Certainly this has a lot to do with the foods that were widely available at the time. Most women would cook what grew in their kitchen garden, and exotic spices were hard to come by and expensive.

Still, that doesn't mean that our boiled turnip greens have to be boring, right? It was a little tricky figuring out how to make them more palatable, but a squeeze of lemon and a dash of salt improved them tremendously. Both additions seemed historically accurate. Apparently turnip greens "are still better boiled with Bacon in the Virginia Style," but I didn't have any bacon on hand, and besides, that seemed to defeat the point.


Turnip Tops
(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

1 bunch turnip greens
1/2 lemon
a few pinches of salt, divided

Trim the stems off the turnip greens and cut into 3-inch slices. Bring a large pot of water to boil, and season with several pinches of salt. Boil the turnip greens for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain in a colander, and press down on the greens to squeeze out the remaining water. Squeeze the lemon over the greens and sprinkle with the remaining salt. Serve as a side dish with something more interesting.

Signed, sealed

Valentine's Day is a tough thing to write about because there's so much baggage attached to it. The single folks think you're cruel for reminding them of their single plight, or they take it in hand and have an anti-Valentine's Day. Meanwhile there are the folks in the blase corner who say they don't need Hallmark to help them out in matters of the heart. Having been in the first* two** camps at some point in my life, I'll keep this post short so as not to step on any toes. But I wanted to share a historically-appropriate craft with all of you to mark the occasion.

Giving cards as a token of affection didn't take off as a trend until around the 1840s, when advances in printing techniques made it easier to mass-produce greeting cards. The Victorians went wild with the possibilities, and they produced elaborate lace confections for their sweethearts. Cards unfolded to reveal secret messages, or love poems were written in tiny letters around ornate knots. There were even some super-depressing cards made by Civil War soldiers who thought they were never coming home, complete with drawings of broken hearts.

So while I don't have a colonial card to share with you, I did make one of the simpler, more clever Victorian cards for Josh (lucky man). It's called a puzzle purse, and you make intricate folds in a square piece of paper to enclose a message of your choosing. When folded correctly, the paper closes up into a sealed square. It's sort of like origami, and exactly the kind of intricate thing the Victorians loved.

It's the perfect size for tucking into your love's pocket as a secret surprise. (Or, you know, presenting with an awkward flourish. 'Cause I'm cool like that.)


* college: cupcakes in the dining hall, couples walking hand-in-hand around campus wearing their fanciest clothes. Hard to ignore.

** high school: a night of shopping, sushi, and required viewing of Cruel Intentions. Yeah.

P.S. If you'd like to make your own puzzle purse, instructions are here.

Parsnips redux

For the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about food. Not just perusing recipes to figure out what to make for dinner (although that is one of my major hobbies), but about what I choose to consume.

It all started with Michael Pollan and In Defense of Food. Oh, Michael Pollan, you make me want to be good! You terrify me with your statistics and amaze me with your stories of Aborigines who reverse their Western diseases by returning to a traditional diet. You tell me to eat only food that could potentially rot. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." You tell me to shop from the perimeter of the grocery store, to patronize my local farmers' markets. Josh and I already visit our favorite farmers' market almost every Saturday, and I have been trying to eat more salads. It can't be that difficult.

Of course, then I had to go and see Forks Over Knives last week with a friend. It's a documentary that makes Michael Pollan seem like he's giving me a slap on the wrist. There are even more terrifying statistics, more fascinating stories of reversing Western diseases (like cancer....what?!), and a famed doctor from Cleveland to ante up the personal connection. He and the others tell me to eat a whole foods, plant-based diet. So, almost only plants.

Well. Okay. They do have some pretty compelling reasons.

But, as my friend and I discussed after the show, how do you change your diet over to an exclusively vegan one when you've grown up eating meat and dairy? Even if you can get your protein from plants, how do you change your mindset? And how do you resist the hot dogs at the farmers' market, the fish tacos and barbecue from the food trucks that are taking over Providence?

And how, for God's sake, do you accommodate your minor obsession with baking?

Maybe you have to adjust a little bit at a time. Maybe your grocery cart will be filled with mostly plants, but also with a carton of milk and a package of salmon, because you just love salmon. Maybe you'll go to the farmers' market every Saturday, and buy up all the root vegetables you could possibly need for the week, but you'll still stop by the hot dog truck and the bakery truck (because you just discovered their apple cider doughnut holes).

I'm not a person to make changes overnight, or lightly. I've thought a lot about adding more plants to my diet, and limiting the amount of animal products because I probably don't need as much as I think I do. And Pollan's book and the documentary were both sobering and inspiring. But I'm nervous about getting enough protein, and I know I'll need to adjust to the changes in my diet and shopping habits over time.

So this is how I'm going to do it: one recipe at a time. Reducing the meat here, adding a vegetable there. Giving myself permission to still use milk and eggs, because that will be a much more difficult transition.

Last night I returned to my enemy, the parsnip. It was time we had a serious discussion about how to make it more palatable. If I'm going to eat more vegetables, then they'd better start tasting delicious. And I wanted to see if I could align my plant goals with my historical cooking goals.

I turned to a simple Williamsburg recipe for mashed parsnips. You boil the parsnips until tender, then mash them up and "remove the strings" (I wasn't sure how to do this, so I just cut out the core). Return them to the pot and reheat with "Milk or Cream as necessary." Stir in a bit of butter, and you're ready to serve.

Not the healthiest way to serve a vegetable, that's for sure, but like I said, this is a slow and gradual process. Sometimes you have to trick yourself into eating more vegetables. And the result?A creamy, nutty mash, with hints of boiled milk. It was almost like parsnip porridge, in the most satisfying way.

I'm not sure how feasible it will be to eat more plants at the same time as cooking historical recipes (which call for lots and lots of animal products), but it'll make this project even more interesting...

Mashed Parsnips

(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

four small parsnips

1/4 - 1/2 cup milk or cream (I used a bit of both)

1 tsp butter

pinch of salt

Peel and trim the parsnips and boil in a medium pot until tender, about 20 minutes. Pour out the water and cool. When cool enough to handle, mash up the parsnips and remove the center core. Over low heat, cook the mashed parsnips with the milk or cream (whatever amount seems right to you) until thick. Stir in the butter and salt. Serve.

welsh rabbit

It sounds exotic, right? Welsh rabbit. Or, as Mrs. Hannah Glasse called it in her Art of Cookery in 1774, Welch Rabbit.

Surprise! It's cheese on toast. (Served with kale salad.)

My previous experience with this dish, also known as Welsh rarebit, is limited. Back in high school, I blazed through Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series, a wonderfully old-fashioned series set in turn-of-the-century Minnesota. The main characters deal with regular high school problems and romantic dramas, and every now and then they make exotic-sounding dishes like Welsh rarebit in their chafing dishes. I was fascinated.

Then a few years later I found myself at a very old-boys'-club-type restaurant that happened to serve Welsh rarebit, and of course I had to try it. The dish came as a piece of toast swimming in a luscious cheese sauce, accompanied by bits of bacon. I'm sorry to say that I didn't like it very much. The sauce was made with beer, and back then I was an innocent little freshman who'd never had a drink in her life. So I chalked it up as one of those unfortunate culinary experiences, never to be tried again.

Flash forward to the present day. My tastes have (thankfully) evolved since then, and the recipe didn't look too dangerous. The cookbook writer Mrs. Glasse did instruct me to "toast the Cheese on one Side, lay it on the Toast, and with a hot Iron brown the other Side," which could have gotten dicey. I don't know about you, but I like to reserve my iron for making my clothes smooth. So while this could have gone in a whole different direction, I kept it simple. Mrs. Glasse also didn't specify the amount of cheese to use, so I sliced up just enough to cover the toast and kept it at that. It made for a delicious, easy dinner.

And the fancy name? No one's sure where the name came from, but it might have originated as a slur on the Welsh people and their skill at hunting rabbits. Or their inability to afford rabbit's meat.

I'll take cheese on toast any day.


Very Easy Welsh Rabbit
(adapted from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery)

1 piece of bread
a few slices of cheddar cheese
1 tbsp Dijon mustard

Preheat the oven to 400 F and set a rack at the top of the oven. Meanwhile, toast the bread in a toaster. When it's ready, set the toast on a baking sheet and arrange the cheese on top. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbling and brown. Before serving, brush with the mustard.