Preserving the Old Ways

Old Cookbooks, Dame Maggie, and Hungry Bees

Preserving the old ways from being abused

Protecting the new ways for me and for you

What more can we do?

—”The Village Green Preservation Society,” The Kinks, 1968

Listen here to the full song and then to Natalie Merchant's lovely cover version.

I’ll give you the recipe

I have a general idea of the age range of my readers, so it’s not a huge leap to assume that the majority of you own at least one recipe written in ink, on an index card, that was given to you by someone you know, and that in many cases it was a recipe you requested. The food someone made was so delicious that you wanted to replicate the taste, or you remember a certain dish from your childhood, so you asked some version of the timeless question: Could I have the recipe? Chances are that you kept the physical paper recipe, rather than digitizing it and throwing away the original. The faded ink handwriting is unique to the recipe writer, and the grease stains on the paper attest to the recipe’s authenticity.

Top L to R: School brownie recipe, Lotta cookbooks, Marked up recipe; Middle row: much-loved Betty Crocker cookbook; Bottom row: Cookbooks & Recipe holders in our kitchen

I search Pinterest or food blogs as much as the next parent who’s in need of quick brownies with 5 ingredients because you promised to bake for 50 high school band members for tomorrow’s event and it’s almost midnight and you are not going out to the store right now even though we’re low on sugar. As a hypothetical situation. The brownies were a hit though. But I have a hoarder’s instinct unhealthy obsession serious problem penchant for collecting cookbooks, and a partiality to books and recipes given to me by people whose table I’ve shared. Recipes passed down from great-grandmothers, those gifted to me by women who attended my bridal shower, and collected from friends and co-workers after a party or potluck. The sharing of recipes is imbued with historical etiquette; when someone lets you in on the secrets of a family dish, you’ve attained a respectable degree of trust. Food blogs have tried to replicate this feeling, but it’s just not the same. We quickly scroll past the flowery history or click skip to recipe because we don’t have a personal connection to the writer or their food; they just fit the keywords we fed the search engine.

Most of the time, my general inward feeling toward all things grownup is most akin to Imposter Syndrome. Then, once in a while, I’m brought face-to-face with the awareness that I am an adult. This is not always through dramatic or difficult means. In fact, not many months ago, an elementary school acquaintance sent me a message on social media asking for a recipe, and I was able to find it for her, and that just seemed like a very middle-aged thing to do. She remembered a cookie recipe that my family had contributed to our school cookbook, which was compiled and sold as a fundraiser at some point in the 1980’s. She’d made them for her kids many times, but had lost the recipe. Both my mom and grandma still had copies of that cookbook (as, it turned out, did other class moms), so we ended up sharing tips on substitute ingredients for various dessert recipes, in that centuries-old tradition of adults.

Now you, too, can join the circle of trust! 😎Click the link for a printable version of the Snickerdoodle Recipe.

I suspect it’s not as common now, in this age of endless consumer choice, for multiple people in your social network to own the same obscure cookbook, and I don’t think I’ve bought a locally compiled fundraising cookbook in over 20 years.¹ Hopefully someone, somewhere, is putting a new one together, because there’s just something about using a recipe from someone in your community that you can’t get from browsing allrecipes.com. Not to say we can’t replicate some sense of it online; I’m more likely to use a food preservation or holiday recipe shared by a Substack friend than from a random website. No one would say I’m the cook in the family, but I love to play around with baking. I flagrantly mark up recipes with alterations, using ink on paper to help whoever ends up with them when I’m gone, to bake them like I did. Come to think of it, I should’ve made the brownies from that school cookbook for the band…

A moment for Dame Maggie Smith

In my last post, I used her role in Downton Abbey for meme-ery. She passed away 8 days later, so I felt I should include a dignified photo of her this time. Most recognizable to younger generations as Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies (the last 3 of which she filmed while undergoing breast cancer treatment) and as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey (which she herself never watched); she played countless roles over 7 decades, on screen and stage, and collected at least 15 awards from Oscars to Baftas.

Maggie Smith, b. December 1934, d. September 2024

You can read her London obituary here. My fall watch list now includes (reading then watching) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and rewatching Gosford Park (2001) which reportedly was Julian Fellowes’ pre-Downton foray into writing stories centered on the misadventures of British society’s upper crust. Rest in peace, Dame Maggie.

Garden Update

It’s just past Michaelmas weekend (which was high school Homecoming & birthday weekend here, so no feast of goose & blackberries) and the turn of October, which at last is bringing Autumn weather to our area of Michigan. There have been blue daytime skies, nighttime rain, and cool breezes to temper the glorious warmth. Cherry tomatoes are still slowly rolling in, and we’ve just been eating them fresh, mainly as pico de gallo. There is still a proliferation of goji berries, which go straight to the dehydrator; they have an unpleasant (to my taste) astringent quality when fresh. I’m still harvesting herbs, both culinary and medicinal, which I air dry and either store that way or mix as tinctures. The elderberry is showing off with another round of blossoms and fruit.

Top L to R: Our 1 sweet pepper, 1 watermelon, scant beans; Mid L to R: Gojis, cherry tomatoes, milkweed; Bottom L to R: Our 1 pepper ripened, more tomatoes, wee potatoes

The garlic is planted for harvest next year. The string bean plants gave lovely red flowers, but failed to yield enough beans for more than a snack. There is a single watermelon; a poor showing from the potato plants. Similarly, we have a few hot peppers and exactly 1 sweet pepper. Thankfully, we’ve been the recipients of other people’s garden overflow, including some very spicy habaneros.

Bee Update

We currently have five(!) hives, all queen right. The newest hive is making a replacement queen, though, so that will be interesting and very possibly a failure, especially given the time of year. This long run of unseasonably warm weather has to end sometime, and our first frost is expected near the end of the month.

Sighting of Her Majesty— not the one with a coup being plotted against her

We’d purposefully planted flowers and native varieties with the goal of blooms through the fall for pollinators, but that isn’t sufficient for the need. So we’ve been feeding 2:1 sugar water inside the hives and leaving out bowls of it around the yard, as a decoy for would-be hive robbers and a nectar-ish source for foraging pollinators; fall food source levels being directly related to winter survival rates of bees. To see more bees on our spring flowers, we should provide them forage in the fall. Honeybee colonies will typically continue to send out foragers until daytime temperatures drop to 50℉ (10℃), and bumblebees until 45℉ (7℃).

Top L to R: Mullein flowers, Elderflowers beloved by bees, Michaelmas daisies; Crocus, Beehive with top feeder, Honeybee on cilantro blossom; Bottom L to R: Native tickseed, Hot pepper plant, More elderflower

What could you plant next Spring to help feed pollinators next Autumn? There are great suggestions at the links here at Epic Gardening and by gardening zone here. You can also hold off on deadheading your summer blooms until the pollinators have gone into hibernation. Consider this your permission to remove “tidying the flower garden” from your to-do list. Birds will visit you all winter for the seeds, native bees will stay warm inside the stems, and leaf debris will provide shelter for other beneficial insects.

Our tears and prayers are with all those in the southeastern U.S. whose homes, towns, and livelihoods have been destroyed by Hurricane Helene; not to mention the tragic loss of life.

Until next time, may your gardens bring forth good harvests and the times we live in be less interesting.

—Erin, in Michigan

1. I have been gifted one, though, that supports the organization Catholic Rural Life. Copies are available for purchase here on their website. They do good work, including “partnering with sustainable agriculture organizations and advocating for a new kind of Farm Bill beyond subsidies and commodity production… environmental justice and climate change… and expanded (their) website as an information source for agriculture, food and the environment in light of Catholic social teachings.” (Accessed 10/3/24: https://catholicrurallife.org/about/history/)