Mini-Update (Week of September 21)

September 23 - How did platonic kissing get stopped in its tracks? Will the swine flu give it the kiss of death? Once a common part of greetings, it's now relegated to scenes from the French cinema and high-fashion caricature. Along with other varieties, "la bise," or cheek-to-cheek kissing, survives for the moment, despite recent warnings. A correspondent to Hone muses on this "obsolete custom," as it was once practiced in England:

It appears that, under the Tudor reigns, 'the women of this country took great offence if they were not saluted in the form of kissing.' [...] The 'embrace' was not left off, even between men, in the days of James I.; for the Spanish ambassador, being indisposed, it appears 'James visited him, and gave him a hearty embrace in bed.'

The correspondent has it on good authority that, in France, a friend or relation of any gender would resent not being greeted with a friendly kiss. So why did the custom die out in England?

The change of religion, from catholic to protestant, no doubt produced a great change in our national manners and habits, which our neighbors, still adhering to the old religion, have retained.

Before the Reformation, he surmises, "a very striking resemblance" would have been found between French and English habits, spectacles and pastimes. [YB]

Image from Current.com

Mini-Update (Week of September 7)

September 7 - Pining for the fjords? Beware, writes a correspondent on this day in 1825, of the Viriginia Nightingale and other painted birds for sale.

To the Editor of the Times

Sir,--I consider it necessary to inform the public, through your paper, that there is a fellow going about the town, (dressed like a painter,) imposing upon the unwary, by selling them painted birds, for foreign ones.

The trick consisted of showing a paper bag, and saying that he'd been working for a gentleman about to leave England for a foreign country. The gentleman gave the painter his birds, who in turn, would tell a small audience,

but I'm as bad as himself, for I'm going down to Canterbury to-morrow morning myself, to work, and they being of no use to me, I shall take them down to Whitechapel and sell them for what I can get.

Taking a bird out of the bag, he described it as 'a Virginia nightingale, which sung four distinct notes or voices.' Beautiful plumage, too: 'its head and neck was a bright vermilion, the back betwixt the wings a blue, the lower part to the tail a bright yellow, the wings red and yellow...the belly a clear green.' Money changed hands, all the birds were sold, and the fellow quickly departed.

In the course of an hour, continues the correspondent, a barber, a knowing hand in the bird way, who lives in the neighbourhood, came in, and taking a little water, with his white apron he transferred the variegated colours of the nightingale to [his white apron]. The deception was visible--the swindler had fled--and the poor hedge-sparrow had his unfortunate head severed from his body, for being forced to personate a nightingale.

A Licensed Victualler

Upper Thames-street [EDBv1]

Mini-Update (Week of August 31)

September 1 - Dark, rich colors fill the month. Saffron - and its butterfly - appear this month, and its stamens are dried into flat square cakes. The clown in the Winter's Tale, reckoning up what he is to buy for the sheepshearing feast, mentions 'saffron to colour the warden-pies.'

Wardens, a type of long-keeping cooking pear, were found at Cistercian Abbey of Warden, in Bedfordshire. Cooked in wine and nestled in a pie with saffron and ginger, the pears became a sweet filling.



Warden Pie

Take the fairest and best wardens*, and pare them, and take out
the hard cores on the top, and cut the sharp ends at the bottom
flat; then boil them in white wine and sugar, until the syrup grow
thick; then take the wardens from the syrup into a clean dish,
and let them cool; then set them into the coffin, and prick cloves in
the tops, with whole sticks of cinnamon, and great store of sugar,
as for pippins; then cover it, and only reserve a vent hole, so set
it in the oven and bake it: when it is baked, draw it forth, and take
the first syrup in which the wardens were boiled, and taste it, and
if it be not sweet enough, then put in more sugar and some
rose-water, and boil it again a little, then pour it in at a the vent
hole, and shake the pie well; then take sweet butter and rose-water
melted, and with it anoint the pie lid all over, and strew upon it
store of sugar, and so set into the oven again a little space, and
then serve it up. And in this manner you may also bake quinces*.

from "The English Housewife", Gervase Markham, Edited by
Michael R. Best, McGill-Queen's University Press, Canada,
1986, p. 104, #130 [YB]

Recipe from http://www.florilegium.org/

Image from http://www.tastesofbedfordshire.co.uk/

September 4 - Tricks for harvest-time include 'how to keep apples' - for up to a year - and an alternative to produce stickers.

For keeping apples, try the following:

Gather them dry, and put them with clean straw, or clean chaff,
into casks; cover them up close, and put them into a cool dry
cellar. Fruit will keep perfectly good a twelvemonth in
this manner.


For the cultivator of choice fruit, this trick may be handy, as a way around modern identification labels:

Let [him] cut in paper the initial letters of his name, or any
other mark he likes; and just before his peaches, nectarines,
&c. begin to be coloured, stick such letters or mark with
gum-water on that side of the fruit which is next to the
sun. That part of the rind which is under the paper will
remain green, in the exact form of the mark, and so the
fruit be known wheresoever found, for the mark cannot
be obliterated. [EDBv2]

Image from LAT's Emerald City Blog