bunnyjadwiga

So, I had promised to bring yummy treats in order to bribe my co-workers into coming to Groupwise training this afternoon. (Yes, our library runs on food.)
Fortunately, Juergen kindly put in the air conditioner so it was doable.

Last night I made a batch of Anise Bizcochos, from Brighid ni Chairain's redaction, just to make sure I still know how to do it. http://members.tripod.com/~breadbaker/sweets.html
The answer is yes, but I need not to let the dough sit as long between batches.
Yummy.

And then I made gingerbread, using the recipe from Form of Cury:

Curye on Inglysch p. 154
To make gingerbrede. Take goode honey & clarifie it on + e fere, & take fayre paynemayn or wastel brede & grate it, & caste it into + e boylenge hony, & stere it well togyder faste with a sklyse + at it bren not to + e vessell. & + anne take it doun and put + erin ginger, longe pepper & saundres, & tempere it vp with + in handes; & than put hem to a flatt boyste & strawe + eron suger, & pick + erin clowes rounde aboute by + e egge and in + e mydes, yf it plece you, &c.

This time I think I got the proportions as I like them and had them written down:
1 cup honey
2.5 cups breadcrumbs
1 rounded tsp ginger
1/2 a medium long pepper
1/3 tsp saunders
Whole Cloves
Sugar to roll in

Heat the honey to a simmer. Stir in the breadcrumbs with a silicone spatula (heavy duty) or wooden spoon. Add the ginger, grate in the long pepper and add the saunders. Mix in. Get yourself set up with pot of gingerbread, bowl of sugar to roll in, container of whole cloves, plate to put gingerbread in. This will allow the mixture to cool off enough to be handled.
Take handfuls of the mixture and knead with your fingers. When it forms a cohesive paste, pull off an amount the size of a superball and roll it into a firm ball. Insert a clove; roll in sugar, and set aside. Repeat. When the mixture is hottest, do one ball at a time; as it cools down, you can do larger quantities and roll them into ropes to pinch off from.
You MUST firmly incorporate the bread crumbs with the honey to get a good flavor and texture. If the balls crack or don't hold together you need to knead the mixture more. You can tell when a ball is ready when you roll it between your hands and it pulls away from your skin slightly as you roll.

The longer these sit, the spicier they are.

Recently I plowed through Not in Front of The Servants: Domestic Service in England 1859-1939, by Frank Dawes. It was fascinating reading. The author, the son of a former indoor servant, collected reminiscences from former servants via a newspaper advertisement, and combined that with archival materials and printed instructional and statistical sources from the period. Some editions were subtitled "A true portrait of upstair/downstairs life." It's a fascinating portrait of the kind of work indoor domestic servants were expected to do, and their average working conditions.

It's pretty clear that indoor servants had very long working hours, and that their employers expected them to be ready to jump to service at a minute's notice. Housemaids, tweenies, and scullery maids as young as 10 or 12 worked steadily all day at a variety of physically demanding tasks. Working conditions could be, and often were, uncomfortable and degrading.

However, I couldn't help comparing the information given in Dawes' work about the work of domestic servants, with that given in other sources about women's work in their own homes in the time period described. It's certainly true that many of the upper-class women who employed multiple servants were women of leisure, and did not do any of their own housework. However, other sources suggest that the division of laboring to non-laboring women was not concise and clear as Dawes paints it, and that no matter what the public facade might be, a significant number of women both employed domestic help and did housework themselves. It's possible that this division was far more cloudy in America than it was in Britain.

But Dawes is not very familiar with the history of domestic service in the 16th & 17th century; some of the customs he suggests are unaccountable would be illuminated by a look at earlier custom- and ettiquette sources. My impression is that he also doesn't seem to grasp the scale of domestic work in even working-class households of the period. It never occurs to him that the tracts encouraging the domestic servant to be happy with her lot because she would work just as hard in her own home if she had one might have some truth in them. (As a male writing in 1974, Dawes would be unlikely to be familiar with the unending nature of housework.) As difficult and disadvantaged as employment 'in service' might be, there were some advantages (division of labor, for instance, so that one would not have to be chasing children and blacking the same time) and having a roof over one's head and, in a good situation, food on the table. Dawes quotes Florence Faux, "Most people thought service, where food and lodging were assured, a better proposition than working in a shop or factory under sweated conditions," despite the danger of being turned off without a reference.

Some of the letters that Dawes reproduced are on the web here:
http://www.swallowcliffehall.com/letters.html

Was looking up information for a patron today and realized I had no handy reference to websites and reference books on Saints. So here are my notes:

Catholic Online Saints & Angels: http://www.catholic.org/saints/
Patron Saints Index: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/indexsnt.htm
New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ [out of date-- pre-vatican II]

From Internet Public Library listings:
http://www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/ss-index.htm

For Medieval Saints, there's the Internet Medieval Sourcebook section on Saint's Lives:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook3.html

Oxford Dictionary of Saints [at Drew, 270.0922 F233o 2003, Cornell Room]

EDIT: My boss points out that Butler's Lives of the Saints is the best resource we have in print to start with. [At Drew, in the Cornell Room, 235.2 B985ℓ 1995]

Fox's Book of Martyrs

Dumberton Oaks Hagiography database (8th to 10th century, Byzantine) http://www.doaks.org/hagio.html

I'm very fond of:
Saints Preserve Us! : Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You'll Ever Need by Sean Kelly
and
Heaven Help Us : The Worrier's Guide to the Patron Saints by Clare La Plante
but both of these are more about folklore than hagiography.

Stearns, Peter N., ed. Encyclopedia of European social history from 1350 to 2000. (New York : Scribner, 2001) 6 vol.
( Read more... )