Last Tomato

Picked the last ripe tomato of the season. As you can tell, there won't be any canning this week.

Elsie de Wolfe's Paris

I admit to being an Elsie de Wolfe fan. When I saw that Charlie Scheips had a new book, Elsie de Wolfe's Paris:Frivolity Before the Storm, I couldn't resist.

Scheips, who is a social historian and curator discovered of a cashe of unpublished photographs. Not only were there photographs of de Wolfe's parties with their famous guests, there were also many candid shots of the extensive preparations for the parities. One is rarely privy to such behind the scenes preparation.

In W Magazine, it was reported that Scheips showed the photos to Babs Simpson, a former Vogue fashion editor who was, at the time, 101. Somewhat amazed, she exclaimed,  “Where would one ever wear these beautiful dresses today?”

In fact, where would one ever attend such a lavish party? Even today's 1%ers, don't throw them like this anymore. That is one of the beauties of this book -- it is truly an artifact of a bygone ere.

It is hard to think of de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, at this time as being quite so elderly. She looks very much like someones aged grand-mère, but at 81, she still partied with the best of them!

Elsie and Paul-Louis Weiller in from of her Birthday cake.

The subtitle of Scheips' book, "Frivolity Before the Storm," captures the essence of history. The final Circus Party would take place in 1939. Her home was transformed. Sets were built, caterers commissioned, guest lists made, and orchestras hired.

Everyone would be buzzing about the event, but little did they know that it would be the last legendary ball of the era. Within two months, Adolf Hitler would invade Poland and the world would be forever changed.

The Duchess of Windsor said of Elsie de Wolfe,

"For bringing together all kinds of people in a gay, airy, but flawless setting, I have never known anyone to equal Lady Mendl. she mixes people like a cocktail -- and the results are sheer genius."

Elsie de Wolfe's Paris gives us a peek into that genius and into an era that will never be repeated.

Labor Day of Love

For the past few days, we have been trying to capture the Guinea pig abandoned at the book lender. He has survived dehydration, predation, motorcycles, and fracking truck, proving to be quite the little warrior.

My friend, Ann, upon seeing his picture decided to name him G-Force. And herein lies the problem...

Ann is basically a ten-year-old trapped in grown-up body. She loved the movie G-Force (as did I, I won't lie) about a group of marauding Guinea pigs who save the world from an evil billionaire. But Ann is a grown-up and not very likely to beg for a pet Guinea pig after seeing the movie.

Actual ten-year olds are not so wise. They see the movie, think in their little reptilian brains that Guinea pigs are really cool little crime fighting ninjas and beg for one from the Walmart.

At home, the Guinea pig sits quietly, eats and defecates. That's it. As a parent, one should explain this to the child, and not give in and get a Guinea pig just to abandon it when it doesn't save America.  (P.S. this holds true for Easter chicks and bunnies, and tea cup pigs who grow up to be 400 pound porkers.  Read up on a living creature before you bring it home!!)

So yesterday we devised an old-fashioned trap to catch G.  Everything went as planned. G. got trapped.  Then he went a bit berserk and frankly a berserk Guinea pig is more than just a little bit scary! Then he escaped through a wide section of the wire basket.  One tends to forget that Guinea pigs are just rats with good hair, so we should have seen the escape coming.

Today, we were prepared. Wire basket was covered in chicken wire, cat carrier was close by, leather gloves were donned and soon, G. was in protective custody. Further proof that during a zombie apocalypse you wan to be in my car, because I could feed you...but I digress.

G. is now sitting in his comfy cage with water and chopped carrots, safe from harm.

Later this week he will head off to a safe shelter where he might just find a family to love him. If not he will be housed, and fed and looked after.

While this a fine end for G. I couldn't help but think that he is in far better circumstances than thousands of Syrian children whose parents, after risking their lives would be thrilled for a roof, some water, and a few chopped carrots. Let's hope they all have a similar outcome as the abandoned Guinea pig.

Notes to a Jackass

Dear Jackass:

What possessed you to abandon a Guinea pig at the book lender?

Are Guinea pigs known to be great foragers and defenders of their territory?

Last time I checked, their territory was the Walmart pet section.  Why didn't you abandon him at Walmart?

If you thought that you were leaving him at the Post Office so that we could mail him back to Walmart -- you didn't leave enough postage!

My friend, Ann, gave you the benefit of the doubt.  She suggested that the Guinea pig escaped and ran away.  (From a cage, in a house, to walk miles to the book lender?)  In all fairness, Ann, was the person who years ago yelled frantically for me at 3 am. Pointing out the window in the ground below she asked if the animals frolicking in the D.C. moonlight were bunnies.  They were rats!

Don't get me wrong...I have no great love for Guinea pigs.  Unlike actual pigs, there is no bacon, there. 

They don't sit in your lap and purr.

They don't fetch a ball.

But then, I didn't buy one.  I didn't buy it a cage and bring it home.  I didn't keep it till I was tired of it and then abandon it at the book lender.  P.S. if you wanted to abandon it, why didn't you abandon the cage, too.  That way, so someone who wanted the  Guinea pig could have it?

I have tried to catch it, but to no avail.

When I first saw it, I thought "circle of life."  But no, he has proven to be quite resilient, evading predators. And evading me.

So everyday I feed your Guinea pig, Jackass. 

Let's hope he will someday let me catch him and get him to safe place.

In the meantime, if you are considering getting an animal, think about the long term responsibilities of such a decision.  Some animal can actually outlive you!

Famous Food Friday -- Audrey Hepburn

For most people, this is the image they think of when they think of Audrey Hepburn in a kitchen. Holly Golightly in full tiara examining the contents of her refrigerator: milk and ballet slippers.

Really, to look at Audrey Hepburn one might never think she ate a bite. Such a supposition has a rather sinister truth. As a child in war ravaged Holland, she suffered from acute malnutrition and came very close to starving. Some twenty-two thousand people died of hunger in Holland during World War II.

We also think of Audrey Hepburn as a movie star. Her son, Luca Dotti, says he never knew Audrey Hepburn, and vehemently denied that his mother was an actress telling those who inquired that his mother was, "Mrs. Dotti."

Recently, Luca Dotti shared the Audrey Hepburn he knew as Mum, in a lovely book entitled, Audrey at Home.  It began when a friend pulled a binder off a shelf and Dotti discovered it was a collection of recipes many that, "never made their way to our dining table."  He goes on to say,

"For in the kitchen, as in life, my mother gradually freed herself from everything that was superfluous to keep only that which mattered to her. Those are the recipes you will find  in the pages that follow  -- and the stories that go with them."

As one might suspect, the vast majority of the recipes are Italian. One might not suspect that Audrey Hepburn was a fan of junk food. Here is a recipe that combines the two.  She often ate this sitting in front of the television.

Penne with Ketchup

1/2 pound (250 g) penne or pennette
1 tablespoon (14 g) unsalted butter
2 tablespoons (30 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
Splash of Heinz ketchup or more to taste
Emmentaler cheese, grated for serving

Cook the penne in a pot with abundant slightly salted boiling water; strain when it is "al dente." In the same pot over medium heat, toss the pasta with the butter and oil, mixing for a minute or two. Turn off the heat, cover the pot and wait a few minutes more; this is called "mantecare" and leaves your pasta as smooth as silk. Pour the penne into a serving bowl and toss with a splash of ketchup, just enough to give the pasta a pinkish color. Dot the top here and there with a little more ketchup. Serve with grated Emmentaler cheese.

If you are a fan of Audrey Hepburn, this is a magical book to add to your collection. 


Here a few "extra" photos we have of Audrey in and out of kitchens real and imaginary.

Audrey Hepburn with Mel Ferrer in the rustic kitchen at their home, Villa Bethania.

Audrey in Sabrina.

Audrey in a California apartment.

Gary Cooper and Audrey on the set of Love in the Afternoon.

Famous Food Friday -- The Algonquin Round Table

"A Vicious Circle" by Natalie Ascencios

Natalie Ascencios' "A Vicious Circle" features many of the key players in the what has been dubbed the Algonquin Round Table.  In this illustration you will find: Robert Benchley, Franklin Pierce Adams, Robert Sherwood, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woollcott, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, (seated) Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun. This lively group, supplemented by the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Alice Duer Miller, and Donald Ogden Stewart, held court from 1919 to 1929 at Algonquin Hotel.

They began meeting after John Peter Toohey, a theatrical agent, became angry at Alexander Woollcott for refusing to write about Eugene O'Neill, one of Toohey's clients. Toohey decided to invite Woollcott to lunch as a "thank you" while secretly planning on having Woollcott made fun of.  Of course, Woollcott loved it and began regular lunch meetings that became daily events.

The food came in from Frank Case.  Case managed the Algonquin, buying it in 1927.  It is Case who is credited with the first "round" table.  In the beginning, the group dined in what would become known as the Oak Room and they were seated at conventional tables as if they were any diners. As the group grew, the rectangle table became increasingly cumbersome and the the group was moved to the Rose Room where Case installed a round table.

In 1942, Frank Case wrote a cookbook entitled, Feeding The Lions. It is filled with recipes from the Algonquin kitchen alongside pithy favorites from famous Algonquin diners. Case attributes the title to Edna Ferber.  Ferber writes in the cookbook:

"Highly spiced dishes happen to be my particular weakness and, at the same time, on my dietary taboo list. I manage to be stern with myself, except on those occasions when I lunch at the Algonquin. After looking at all the dishes that I might and should order,I take those curried shrimps with rice that the Algonquin chef does so tantalizingly."

Curry of Fresh Shrimp

2 lbs. raw shrimp (or 1lb. cooked, shelled shrimp)
2 tablespoons butter
1 1.2 tablespoons curry powder
1/2 cup white wine
3 cups rich cream sauce

Prepare 3 cups rich cream sauce, using half cream and half milk.

Boil the raw shrimp in salted water for 5 minutes and allow them to cool. Peel and remove the dark intestinal tract.

Saute them for 5 minutes in 2 tablespoons butter, add the curry powder and the wine and simmer for 5 minutes.  Add to the cream sauce, mix thoroughly and cook for 5 minutes.

Taste for seasoning.

Serve with rice pilaf and chutney.  Grated fresh coconut and chopped toasted almonds are traditional accompaniments.

In 1987, Aviva Slesin won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for The Ten-Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table.  Unfortunately, it has been out of print for years, but recently turned up on YouTube. The Alan Ruldoph film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a pretty good fictional depiction of the era, and an excellent look at the evolving "round" table of Frank Case.

In 1998, The Algonquin received a much needed face-lift and the Rose Room was eliminated. In 2005 the Algonquin produced a new menu incorporating many of the favorites in Frank Case's cookbook.

In this day and age one might ponder if the round table seated a truly vicious circle.  Groucho Marx, brother of regular Harpo, was never comfortable with the luncheon regulars.  A quick wit who possessed his own biting repartee, Groucho Marx said of the Round Table, "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto."

On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life

Lesley Blanch about 100. Photo: Sveeva VIGEVENO/GAMMA

Lesley Blanch is the reason I no longer read much traditional fiction. 

If you were a writer and tried, even tried, to write a fictional account of Blanch's life, a competent editor would tell you that no one would believe it. It is a story too convoluted and rambling, a life both wildly independent and alarmingly sexy, and spanning nearly 103 years. Edit. Edit. Edit.

That was Lesley Blanch. We know of her 103 years (actually she was a month shy of 103) from the numerous books she wrote, a biography here and there, and interviews, but her life still had several large gaps. On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life is a collection of writing that helps to fill in those gaps. Gathered by Blanch's goddaughter, Georgia de Chamberet, we now have a better understanding of Blanch. When the publicist offered me a copy of the book, I jumped at the chance to expand my Blanch collection. When it arrived, it sat on my desk forever. I didn't want to read for I knew that once I had, that sense of anticipation at new revelations would be over. I couldn't wait any longer.

She began life in the English country side in the Edwardian era. It was a very conventional life.  Until a family friend, known as "The Traveller" came into Blanch's life. Though Blanch had always been secretive of his identity, he was Theodore Komisarjevsky, a Russian theatre director and designer. Under the guise of showing her around Paris, a 17 year-old Blanch was escorted and seduced by "The Traveller." Their encounters gave Blanch a flair for the dramatic and a serious case of wanderlust.

She decided to become and artist and attend the famous Slade school at a time she describes as, "post Carrington and Spencer and before the impudent gaiety and colour brought by Rex Whistler or Oliver Messel."

The most amazing revelation in On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life is her writing about her marriage to Romain Gary. She married Gary in 1945 and their marriage was "open" long before there was such a thing. Blanch traveled on her own and Gary indulged in other women. Together they were a golden couple. In 1954, Blanch's The Wilder Shores of Love about four nineteenth-century women travellers was a huge hit and Gary's novel The Roots of Heaven won the Goncourt. The couple became a fixture in Hollywood, hobnobbing with every one from Aldous Huxley to Sophia Loren.

One person Blanch should have, in hind site, kept off the guest list was Jean Seberg. Gary became besotted by Seberg and married her in 1962, weeks after his divorce from Blanch was finalized. Blanch took the divorce in stride and traveled extensively, through Afghanistan,the Sahara, Oman, Outer Mongolia, and Egypt. They continued to have what Blanch described as an amitié téléphonique.

In 1994 Lesley Blanch's house burn to the ground. She lost everything, including her library of travel books as well as her rare collection of Russian and Middle Eastern volumes. For days she sifted through the rubble. She had about given up when she sifted one more corner of ash. There she found two photographs that Romain Gray had entrusted to her years before: one of him as a child and the other of his mother.  Blanch wrote, "They were soul survivors of the disaster....Romain was once more demanding the spotlight."

One could go on and on, suffice to say, if you have never read Lesley Blanch, do. If you are a fan, add On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life to your collection.

Garden Shots

 

English Peas

Green Tomatoes

Beans we thought were climbers but not!

  

Kale &
Rainbow Chard

We spent the day weeding and the next day 

it rained and the next day...weeds everywhere!

Ube Pound Cake

I ran across a recipe for an ube pound cake online. Now, as with so many things online, especially recipes, a lot of people post them without any attribution, which kind of sucks because when someone posts a recipe, they are happy to share it, they just don't you reposting it on your site without the slightest thank you. 

Over at Asian in America, Betty Ann posted her recipe for an ube pound cake. It was really cool and pretty unique -- the "pound" part not the "ube" part. When she got ready to make this cake, and even though it was a very original idea, she used another pound cake recipe on which to base her cake. She used a recipe from Nancie McDermott's cookbook Southern Cakes and she credited it!

Many years ago, over at Cookbook Of The Day, we did a post about a White Fruitcake. The recipe is credited to Eudora Welty, though Miss Eudora was always quick to point out that she stole the recipe. And speaking of Southern cakes, Miss Eudora's stolen recipe also found its way into McDermott's Southern Cakes. 

I made my ube pound cake in a Lucinda's Wood Cake Box, so I tweaked the recipe a bit.  I would have never made it if my friend, Jurry, hadn't dropped what she was doing to head over to the Filipino market to score my ube. I made the above cake and a spare to send out to Jurry.

One cannot always find a clear attribution to recipes.  I often see MY cornbread recipe printed in many places and I can assure you it is the same cornbread recipe my great-great-on-and-on grandmother made. It's even the same skillet!  So it is mine. People are always writing books on where this or that recipe came from. Go ahead, ask a Southerner the exact origin of the Red Velvet Cake.  Everyone thinks they know...

I think recipes are a lot like songs. You sing them in the kitchen, and sometime you sing louder, and sometime you sing slower, and sometime you have to look up the words, and the vast majority of the time you sing it, even if you didn't write it. But if you do know where a recipe comes from, say thanks.

So join in the chorus:

Click on over to Asian in America for her recipe.

Buy yourself a copy of Southern Cakes, for good recipes and even better stories.

Make friends with Jurry, or another Filipino to help you find unique ingredients

Always bake extra and remember, you are never in the kitchen alone.

Coo Day Ta

i am taking over this blog.  From now on it will be Teddyville.

 It's coup d'état!  Learn to use spell check!  And you are not taking over.

But i sneeked in under the cover of darkness with my cat-eye-vision because you are not posting...


Teddy should know the reason. Bless his little heart for trying to get me engaged. A blog should be a fun place where you learn things. Not just how cute cats are (they are!) or about your kids or your grand kids or your kitchen or whatever.   Reading a blog should be fun, educational, and interesting.  Not pitiful and sad. So during our pitiful periods, we simply do not post.

Here at Lucindaville we are having a continuation of our sucky year and frankly, you do not want to hear about it. Fine. The entire month of May we had water issues. While I am convinced that nothing would stop me from surviving the zombie apocalypse, I can assure you that not washing my hair would be the end of me.

I can live through hot temperatures.

Cold temperature.

No Internet, though I would be very cranky.

No television, though I would miss Gilmore Girls reruns...and NCIS.

No overhead lighting.

I could even go for days, weeks, months wearing the same jeans and sweatshirt...as long as I could wash my hair.

No shampoo. No conditioner. No life.

It is a pretty tacky thing to state given that hundreds of thousands of people die each year for lack of clean water and I bitch about my hair. So actually, my life could be exponentially worse. However,  in a month without laundry...I was faced the prospect of a closet with one old prom dress, a tattered tutu, and bleach stained Harley shirt. While I would have turned nary a head at ye ole Walmart, the prospect of blogging in a bright orange prom dress with dirty hair was simply inconceivable.

As June dawns, all appears to be working again.  We have water on a consistent basis. The washer (repaired after breaking during a late spring snow) and the new dryer (the old one died the day AFTER the washer was fixed) have us flush with clean clothes.

And, yes, it would be very funny if it wasn't me.  In keeping with that, one last "woe is me tale."

While being without water to properly wash dishes, I managed to drop a nearly full jar of coconut oil.  The good news is the oil was rather solid, so while the glass broke into a hundred pieces, the oil kept the jar close by.  I set it in a bowl and it sat on the counter for weeks.  When I got water, I decided to wash the bowl and dispose of the coconut oil. 

I took my mother's old Tupperware colander that has been around the kitchen since before I was born and dumped the glass and oil in it and set it out in the sun to separate oil from glass. In my excitement over having mounds of clean clothes, I forgot it was outside.  During the night, a raccoon stole my colander.  This colander had survived at least twenty moves, three generations of cooks, and my carelessness in leaving it on a hot stove resulting and lima bean sized hole that had to be plugged with finger when washing lentils.

A raccoon stole my colander!  This is my life.

So, if you see a raccoon running around with an old, green Tupperware colander, it's probably mine. Tell him I want it back!