A Sad Week In Lucindaville

In a world of mass production and flash mobs it is hard to be the proverbial, "one of a kind." Last week, news trickled out that the world lost two marvelous women who were, each in their own way, one of a kind, Eleanor Perenyi and Maxine de la Falaise McKendry.

Eleanor Perenyi, whose single book on gardening, Green Thoughts, was an opinionated and delicious abecedary of garden wisdom, died at 91. Eleanor Stone went from a school girl at National Cathedral to mistress of 750 acre Hungarian estate and she never looked back. She wrote books, edited magazines and all the while she gardened, marking the ebb and flow, the fertility and decay and she wrote of gardening where the flowers were always full and found that, "eternal bloom led to ennui.”


Maxine de la Falaise McKendry, the woman Cecil Beaton described as "the only truly chic Englishwoman of her generation" died at 86. She was beautiful, in that eternally inquisitive way that makes women timeless. Her mother was said to have cooked fish stew to feed to her roses and her father was a painter. It is no wonder that food and fashion held a theatric air for her. As food editor for Vogue, she wrote Food In Vogue, a compilation of recipes by the famous faces who inhabited the magazine. It is a favorite here in Lucindaville where we featured Lotte Lenya's Meat Loaf.




It is the unenviable job of the obituary writers to sum up a century in a few words. Writer. Muse. Gardener. Model. Wife. Mother. Autodidact. Trendsetter. It is hard to capture in words those intangible moments that a life has to offer. John Donne in his oft-quote Meditation XVII reminds us, no man is an island, but few remember Donne's admonition that, all mankind is of one author. He says: "when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language."

The chapters of Eleanor Perenyi and Maxine de la Falaise McKendry have not been torn out of my book. Every day in the middle of most ordinary; seeing a toad, turning the compost, or making a meatloaf, the story of my life is merely a translation of the lives that have informed me, brought me joy, made me think and laugh and smile. I speak a richer, fuller language because of these women and that doesn't translate into an obituary.


Eleanor Perenyi's Obituary.

Maxine de la Falaise McKendry Obituary.

Famous Food Friday -Lotte Lenya

Maxine de la Falaise edited a book entitled Food In Vogue. It is a collection of recipes from some rich and some famous who appeared in Vogue in the 70' and 80's. Among the recipes she collected was one for meatloaf by Lotte Lenya.

Lotte Lenya was the wife of Kurt Wiell. They were married in 1926. The next year she and appeared in the controversial Brecht–Weill work Little Mahagonny at the Baden-Baden Festival in 1927. She alternated the roles of Jenny and Lucy in Weill's most famous work, The Threepenny Opera.

Lenya and Weill became estranged and finally divorced before they fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933. They continued to live separately, as they made their way to America. In 1935 they reconnected and remarried in 1937. Their second marriage lasted until Weill's death in 1950. She continued to work in the theatre and movies and her role in Roman Spring received a nomination for an Academy Award in 1961.

Lenya’s Meat Loaf

1 pound chopped sirloin
Salt and pepper to taste
1 egg
1/2 cup good quality poultry stuffing
1 small can vegetable cocktail juice
1 small can button mushrooms
2 to 3 tablespoons sherry, or to taste

Preheat oven to 375

Mix the meat, salt, pepper, egg, stuffing,and half of the juice together and form a loaf. Place in a greased loaf pan and bake for one hour. About 5 minutes before the loaf is ready, pour into a small saucepan the other half of the vegetable cocktail, the mushrooms and the sherry. Heat, then pour over the loaf. Serve with noodles, rice, kasha, pilaf, or any other starchy accompaniment you like.

Lotte Lenya died in New York from cancer in 1981. She remains one of the most interesting characters of the 20th century. For more information on Weill and Lenya, read their collected letters, Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.