The recipes for October in The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) fill me with the same emotion as looking ahead to October does: impending doom. I always hope that October days will consist mostly of me listening to the crunch of leaves underfoot as I stroll through a historical cemetery, and the nights will be filled with watching a child's head melting into a pile of bugs and snakes or trundling through the murder ride. And then I remember that last October, one of my three jobs required 60 hours of labor in a week when I also had four classes' worth of essays to grade. So, yeah. Impending doom.
The first recipe for October shows how gardeners used to prepare for the doom of an early frost.
If the tomatoes wouldn't get any more time to grow this year, they could always be picked green and then pickled. It's nice that instead of simply feeling helpless in the face of adverse weather, the cooks could make something nice to last them until next tomato season.
The second image of impending doom has nothing to do with the recipe, and just like my visions of the impending work-pacalypse, there's not a lot anyone could have done to prepare.
Okay, I'm amused by the line "Clean, trim and wipe dry a handsome salmon trout." (Apparently you shouldn't eat an ugly one? And how does one judge a fish to be "handsome," anyway?) Overall, though, I'm more interested in the photo: a Mount St. Helens that is notably pointier than the one we see today. When this picture was taken, the volcano had been mostly quiet for 100 years, and of course now I know that it had less than a quarter century to go until it would erupt again. It looks so beautiful and serene from here, and yet, it all blew up pretty quickly. That's just what October tends to do to me. I hope you have a lovely month while I try to brace myself for the impending cataclysm.
Not only do you have to find a handsome salmon trout, you have to baste it every 5 minutes. Interesting that you turn the oven down, then open the door every 5 minutes. I didn't recognize Mount St Helens in the picture. Yes, it is much more pointy than it ever was in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteOctober is ominous indeed. At least I have a garage, and snow removal is taken care of at my new apartment, so I keep trying to tell myself winter won't be so bad this year regardless of what the weather does.
That should make a big difference! It is a real pain to try to dig cars out of the snow.
DeleteIt's even worse to try to excavate a spot big enough to park your car in the morning after a huge snow storm. That was the problem with staying in town, especially if I had to work the next day. Thankfully my neighbor cleared the parking area after I spent what seemed like an hour trying to clear the leavings of the snow plow.
DeleteGreen tomatoes are pretty good, actually. I like fried green tomatoes, and when I was a kid, my grandmother used to make green tomato pie. It sounds weird, but what I wouldn't give to have some of it now that she's been gone for years.
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