Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Engraved into the sidewalks at the corner of Balboa Park on Upas and 28th, there is a list of “Perching Birds of San Diego” and “Local Birds of North Park”. These are those birds.

A great cookbook and a great piece of refrigerator history.

Frigidaire Recipes was the first entry in my Refrigerator Revolution: Revisited series. It came out before I started making reprints available. So I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to revisit it at the same time that I publish the Frigidaire Recipes reprint. Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB) is a wonderful book. It was, in fact, the inspiration for starting this series. While I’d already had the other books in the series, the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes was such an incredible peephole into the early years of the home refrigerator/freezer that I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant about how home refrigerators changed home cooking.

Since writing my original refrigeration post, I’ve tried several more recipes from Frigidaire Recipes, and they continue to be great dishes. Because my tastes are what they are, most of the new recipes are sweet ones, and many of those are (somewhat) appropriate for breakfast. The Chocolate Egg Nog has become a go-to breakfast beverage, in both its original form and with Coffee Sauce instead of the Chocolate Syrup the original calls for.

Coffee eggnog is amazing.

January 10, 1977. The temperature hasn’t risen above freezing for a week. Most days drop below zero. Scientists are speculating about a new ice age. Now, cold in Chicago is nothing new. Neither is cold-blooded murder. But what happened in Chicago in January of 1977 was so unprecedented, so outrageous, that even now I fear to reveal the chilling truth.

It’s amazing how much weird shit came out of the seventies, but what’s even more amazing is how much of it was recycled from the twenties. The idea for this adventure came from the April, 1980, Beyond Reality UFO magazine. The article was by “Ramona Cortez” and titled “Ancient Astronauts of Tatunca Nara”.

During the first week in May of 1925, Colonel Sir Percival Fawcett, went into the lush tropical rain forests of northwest Brazil. The determined British explorer was in search of his dream—a city he felt certain was visited by ancient space travelers from a far-away galaxy many centuries ago.

For years, Fawcett heard detailed accounts of houses with stars to light them which never went out. He wrote in Lost Trails, Lost Cities, his classic text on exploration, “There was some secret means of illumination known to the ancients that remain to be discovered by scientists today.”

This is surprisingly true. The only embellishment is that Fawcett may or may not have “felt certain” that the cause was “ancient space travelers from a far-away galaxy”. But Fawcett was a classic archaeologist-adventurer in the style pastiched by the Indiana Jones series. He was in search of Big Things and those Big Things included Things Beyond Human Ken.

That quote about “some secret means of illumination” is far more exact than I expect from a UFO magazine of the era. I’m surprised that “Cortez” didn’t use the full quote and context. It’s possible they didn’t have Exploration Fawcett at hand—the book was published under both that title and Lost Trails, Lost Cities—and, of course, didn’t have the Internet Archive to help them. The Internet Archive was over a decade into the future. Strange to think that the period between this UFO article and the Internet Archive is far smaller than the period between the Internet Archive and today!

Here’s what Colonel Sir Percival Fawcett actually wrote in his book:

Last year in June I ran a session of Flashing Blades at the North Texas RPG Con, In September I published the dueling aid that I made up for the event. In this post I provide the simple reskin (PDF File, 122.7 KB) and pregenerated characters (Zip file, 36.6 MB).

The reskin was easy. I ran an only slightly modified version of The Grand Theater from Parisian Adventure. It’s a great choice for a one-shot and for a con game. There’s no real plot to it. It’s just an excuse to get into duels in a theater filled with rugs, candles, chandeliers, and Frenchmen. And one Englishman favored by a high-ranking cleric.

An English spy has stolen French naval documents, compromising France’s strength on the seas! More importantly, the King’s Musketeers and the Cardinal’s Guards are vying to restore the documents and capture the spy before their rivals. Get ready to swing from the chandeliers, fight the Cardinal’s guards—or the King’s musketeers—and outwit the enemies of France in Mark Pettigrew’s game of adventure, intrigue, and… flashing blades!

I renamed the adventure En coulisse de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne—Backstage at the Hôtel de Bourgogne—for the simple reason that I’d recently read Cyrano de Bergerac and the even simpler reason that some of the Bourgogne’s history in the period—I chose 1637 to put it right smack dab in Three Musketeers territory—is available online. While Jacob Latchkey is a fictional English spy required by the original Grand Theater adventure, the rest of the Comédiens du Roi are real actors and actresses of the Troupe Royale; they would have played at the Hôtel de Bourgogne during that period and they very possibly would have acted in Pierre Corneille’s La Place Royale.

Mom would be proud: not only is it a less expensive brand, it’s knocked down even from that!

I’ve made some great old cookbooks available under The Padgett Sunday Supper Club banner, as well as one or two not-so-great cookbooks. Today’s is very close to my heart as we approach Mother’s Day on Sunday. For my entire life until she died, my mother has had this red-covered folder (PDF File, 7.1 MB). It was from her home economics class, or whatever it would have been called circa 1960, in high school.

When dealing with vintage recipes, people commonly talk about our lack of knowledge about what the intended audience for those recipes knew. Recipe authors and recipe readers assumed a common understanding that we, fifty or more years later, necessarily lack.

This bit of ephemera from the cusp between the fifties and sixties provides some insight into how some, at least, of that shared knowledge was acquired in that period. As other vintage writers can tell you—Glen Powell, for example—the kinds of background knowledge that recipes assume change over time. The background knowledge that people had during the era of wood ovens will be very different from the era of gas ovens and then electric ovens.

Except for the rice krispy candy I don’t remember any of these dishes, and I don’t know for sure that she even used that recipe instead of the one on the back of most marshmallow bags. These aren’t the classic foods I remember mom making when I was young. What they are, are the recipes that trained her to make those foods.

I do know that mom often had the notebook out when preparing for a potluck or a luncheon. I suspect she was making biscuits, or consulting the measurement equivalents. Those are the pages that look most worn. The rice krispy candy page is very worn. She may also have been using the cherry pie filling recipe for any fruit, judging from its stains. We had pie a lot, but it was rarely cherry pie.

That said, I certainly don’t remember cottage cheese coleslaw, and that’s one of the most stained pages of all.

Available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

In their 1926 Frozen Desserts and Salads, Frigidaire described the “two classes” of ice creams:

Philadelphia Ice Cream, which is made from thin cream, sugar and flavoring, frozen without thickeners or without whipping the cream, and French Ice Cream which has a custard foundation (made from egg) with thin cream and a flavoring.

They went on to describe the variations on frozen desserts:

A mousse is a heavy cream, beaten stiff, sweetened and flavored and frozen by packing without stirring, highly adaptable to preparation in Frigidaire.

The same is true of parfait, a sugar syrup poured over either beaten egg white or yolk of egg and added to the flavored cream.

Sherbets and ices are, naturally, of thinner consistency and likely to show ice particles, but can be made smooth by manipulation.

Understanding these differences was important to Frigidaire’s sales. In 1926 few households were likely to have any experience making ice creams beyond hand-cranked machines filled with salted ice. They were hard work and they made a mess. Those households fortunate enough to own a refrigerator had a lot more options available to them, options once only available when going out to eat at businesses with commercial freezers. Frigidaire wanted people to know about those options, and hopefully buy a Frigidaire refrigerator/freezer because of them!

Over the last year, I’ve discovered two new recipes from old standbys in my cookbook collection, and two new recipes from an even earlier, 1927, cookbook. I’m going to handle these recipes from the youngest to the oldest.

Unlike the rest of social media, which last month was filled with experts on social security and the month before experts on air traffic control and off-and-on experts in foreign policy, I have not suddenly become an economics expert with a specialty in tariffs over the last couple of weeks. I never commented on the stick (tariffs) and I am not now going to comment on the carrot (pausing the tariffs against those countries willing to negotiate).

My earlier post about the war against American workers waged by pre-Trump economists was not about the economics but about how the tariff regime in place before Trump, as described by its supporters was really a war against workers worldwide. It benefits countries that deliberately keep working conditions so poor as to be practically slavery. That is inherent in the design of our currently global economic system. While it isn’t something politicians talk about directly, it is obvious every time some beltway elite denigrates American workers, small towns, and anyone who says or even just implies that we can bring lost industries back to the United States.

They’ve never bothered to use the weapons at their disposal to negotiate a level playing field because why would they? No one thinks it would help. No one in their right mind thinks that the American worker can compete even on a level playing field.

Trump talks and acts as if he does think that, which is probably part of why the beltway says he’s not in his right mind.

What interests me most about this latest social media panic is the intense lack of understanding of Trump as a politician that characterizes so many of these newly-minted economics experts. They seem genuinely confused about Trump’s goal here, and that is, I think, because they see him as a standard politician. He’s not. For most politicians, if you want to know what they want to do, you ignore what they’re saying and you focus only on what they’re doing.

A bowl of… pink?

One of my favorite idiosyncratic cookbooks is Larry Kusche’s 1977 Popcorn. Circa 1977, because it’s come out in multiple versions, including the wonderfully-spined Popcorn Popcorn Popcorn just to get the point across that This book can change your life!

Three times…

Well, Easter can change your life. Popcorn is fun. And Kusche’s book is a great book for popcorn fans.

This year I’m continuing my Christmas-to-Easter candy cane tradition with Kusche’s Spearmint Crackle. The recipe calls for “chopped spearmint-leaf candies” and a little green food coloring to emphasize the spearmint aspect. But it works very nicely with chopped candy canes and no food coloring at all, leaving the popcorn a nice pastel pink.

I recommend using redskin or Spanish peanuts as the nuts in this caramel corn. The red skin nicely complements the Easter pink of the popcorn’s caramel coating. The nuts should definitely be salted: the salt offsets the sweetness of the sugar. If you use unsalted nuts, add an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of salt.

If you somehow end up with a lot of hard candy and you’re not a hard candy eater—not uncommon after Christmas or Easter—consider using them for making popcorn, too. This recipe should work with any hard candy, especially butterscotch candies or root beer barrels. Or for something really different, try lemon sours. I haven’t, but if I suddenly found myself with a bag of them, I’d seriously consider it.

Try to use only one color, or only a few colors that mix well. My dad had a bunch of fruit-flavored candy canes left over from Christmas 2023. He left them out for the grandkids to eat, but the grandkids were not eating them. I told him in the spring that if they were still there come Thanksgiving I’d be making caramel corn out of them.