In The Vintage Kitchen

Growing A Fragrant Year: Violas For March and Part of April

Published on April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

{A Fragrant Year is an ongoing series shared throughout 2024 highlighting twelve fragrant plants, trees, flowers, shrubs and herbs added to the New England garden landscape, month by month, surrounding a house built in 1750. This series was inspired by the 1967 garden book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. If you are new to the blog, catch up with our first introductory post here.}

March blew into the kitchen in a flurry of raindrops, wind chills and the occasional threat of one more snowstorm. My favorite local nursery didn’t open for the season until mid-month, and as we are quickly learning, not much happens in New England on any sort of instant gardening level until the beginning of April. So this month, there will be two fragrant garden posts – one for March and then the other for April so that we can keep on track for a full year of fragrant gardening month by month.

When our local garden nursery did open its doors for the season, a much-anticipated event in my world, a sea of pastel colors unfolded rack by rack, tray by tray, row by row. Aside from all that lovely Easter egg-shaded splendor, the thing that immediately greeted everyone at the door was the unexpected scent of warm honeycomb. This was not a fragrance brought on by bees zipping in and out of the flower pallets nor by close-by hives where they like to linger. This was the scent of violas, our featured fragrant flower for the month of March and part of April.

Dainty and delicate, a smaller but more robust version of their bigger blossomed offspring, the pansies, violas have always been a flower I passed by in previous years because of their size and what I thought was a sort of a hum-drum, everyday ordinariness. But when seeing them altogether, in masses of bright purples, oranges, lavender blues, crimson reds, lemon yellows and perfect whites they were a bright sight for winter-weary eyes. I also never realized what an incredible fragrance they carry, but after reading all about them in Helen and Leonie’s book, The Fragrant Year they were definitely worth a second look. “The fragrance reaches out to snare you into stopping, marveling, ” wrote Helen and Leonie back in 1967. Indeed.

Technically considered an herb, violas are the parent plant of pansies, and though while smaller in size, will put out more buds and blooms in the late winter/early spring months than pansies. They are also a heartier plant that is able to withstand freezing temperatures and snowy landscapes, an ideal match for our New England climate, but also for other areas around the country that experience cool weather temperatures during springtime too. Ideal temperatures for growing these ladies are 40 degrees at night and 60-70 degrees during the day.

“The end of the growing season is the beginning for violas since short cool days are needed to trigger bud formation,” write Helen and Leonie. That means that when you plant violas, you actually encourage two growing seasons from them each year – one in fall and one in spring. And since they come in an array of colors beyond the most traditional (lavender), they can complement most garden palettes. Here are just a few color choices within the viola family…

First discovered in the Pyrenees, violas have been part of kitchen gardens for centuries. Used in making tea, wine, and liqueurs, they are also members of the edible flowers club. Not only do they add an interesting slightly sweet flavor to salads, cheese, butter and desserts but they also add beauty and color to the plate as well. And their contributions to everyday life just don’t stop at the kitchen either. Throughout history, violas have also been used in making perfume and medicinal salves since they contain both anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties. These flowers might be mini in size but they certainly are mighty when it comes to usefulness.

I came home with a variety called Penny Lane (a hybrid of the Viola cornuta family) which comes in a mix of shades ranging from deep red to white and yellow. The more you plant, the greater the scent of course, but it’s amazing to think that even one small plant can carry what seems like an entire perfume factory in just a few petals.

We have French botanist, Rene Louiche Desfontaines (1750-1833) to thank for describing and naming this variety of viola. He did this in the late 1700s, which makes them a very age-appropriate choice for 1750 House. That was an unexpected surprise learned after I brought the Penny Lanes home, but now that they are firmly nestled under a crab apple tree, tucked in between woodland border beds of daylilies and foxglove starts from last year (see more of those below) they seem quite fitting.

My eight plants might not be much of an exuberant site at the moment, but one of the fun things about violas is their ability to self-seed on their own. In theory, fingers crossed, in the next couple of years, we’ll see violas popping up all over the woodland areas surrounding this small bed that will add color, interest and most importantly, fragrance to the early spring and late autumn landscape. We’ll catch up with them again in fall to see how this set is doing and to see how much they’ve grown over the course of the next seven months.

Meanwhile, here are some other sights and updates from the greenhouse diaries of March and part of April 2024…

New pathways around the greenhouse and the yard are underway. We’ve lined each one with a wattle border using invasive vines cut down from the woodlands that were taking over some of the tree canopies. Landscaping bushes, a short fence around the greenhouse, and more planting beds are coming soon to that area.

Do you remember the first planting of the foxglove seedlings from last year? This is them now after being planted in the garden last May. The one thing that is difficult to find online these days is a visual example of what foxglove, started from seed, should look like year one just as a green plant before it flowers in year two. There are plenty of photographs that show foxglove fully flowered out in year two but none taht I could find at least of how the plants should look in their first year. I’m so happy to share these photos because hopefully it will become a helpful reference for other gardeners too. As I discovered, year one foxglove plants (leaves only) are beautiful.

In the first year, they grow to about the size of a large head of lettuce and stay green year-round including during the winter – even in below-freezing temperatures and snow. We planted ours on the edge of the woods in an area that we will continue adding to year after year, so that eventually the woodlands bordering the edge of the yard will be lush and green and full of foxglove. Much prettier than looking at bare patches of dirt.

The collard greens and the peas have been planted in their springtime beds…

The pea patch also increased in size to three 8 foot rows. The more peas the better.

And the brocolli is now 12″ inches tall. The beets greens are growing.The kale is just right at 6″ inches now and Liz has a lemon with triplets on the way.

An industrious pair of black-capped chickadees pecked their way through a post on the back porch of 1750 House. What’s particularly fascinating is that this post is not made of wood but of a plastic composite that holds up one corner of the 1990s addition. The post will eventually get replaced with real wood, but for now, the chickadees seem more than happy to call it home. And we are more than happy to have these cute little songbirds as neighbors. Not only do they sing their way through the day but they also feast on a host of insects that can be problematic in the garden including the dreaded scale bug, which we had troubles with last year.

And just in time for publication of this post, something arrived in the mail…

Could it be the witch hazel from February’s Fragrant Garden post?! Stay tuned for the second half of April’s Fragrant Garden series coming soon. In the meantime, cheers to the cheerful viola. Happy Spring!

A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Chapter 5 – The Lost Item is Revealed

Published on March 25, 2024March 29, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen12 Comments

{Spoiler Alert: This is the final installment in a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost in 2008 and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.}

There’s a quote by an unknown writer that states… “What’s meant for you will never miss you, and that which misses you was never meant for you.” This quote sits on the shop’s recently sold page, acting as a sort of hopeful reassurance to any shopper who winds up there only to discover that an item that had originally caught their eye has sold to someone else. It can be so disappointing to be confronted with the fact that some newly discovered treasure that immediately captured your heart is now in another’s hands. But I love the idea of fate and what it suggests in this quote. Should an item be destined to be in your life it will present itself again, some other day, some other time.

Over the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about this quote. The idea that something will return to you if it was meant to be is such a comfort. When I think about it in the context of the lost item, I see how truthful the quote really is and how incredible the spontaneity of the universe and fate’s voice in it really are. As discussed in Chapter 4 of A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts, this journey of the lost item is all about timing, and I can’t help but think that although it took sixteen years for a lost item to get back to the people it belonged to, it came home at the most appropriate time. Like it was waiting all those years for just the right moment to reconnect with family, and in turn to reconnect with history.

Everyone has waited long enough to hear what this mystery item is, so I won’t prolong it anymore, only to say that upon the reveal of the item, all the dots that were laid out in the first four chapters of this story will be connected here in this post. So keep reading if you want to learn how it all unfurled from start to finish.

Just to recap quickly from Chapter 4, where the lost item was journeying to its final destination, these are the things that we know so far about the lost item…

The lost item is over 100 years old.
The item was left behind at an office supply store in a suburb of Atlanta GA in 2008.
A random stranger named Angela discovered the item and tried to track down it’s original owner. For thirteen years her search was unsuccessful.
In 2021, with the help of a Facebook group, Angela was able to connect the lost item to the Vintage Kitchen via a blog post that was written in 2018.
In July 2021, after confirming that the Vintage Kitchen was indeed connected to the lost item, it was mailed via UPS to ITVK in a cardboard envelope.
Although the Vintage Kitchen is connected to the lost item, it does not belong here in the Vintage Kitchen.
In January 2024, the lost item made its way home to its final destination via a journey that involved a plane, three cars, and one boat.
The journey of the lost item took 16 years and 6,500 miles to complete.
Time played a major role in the story of the lost item.

Without further ado, the mystery item that arrived in the Vintage Kitchen in July 2021 was packaged in this cardboard envelope of medium thickness….

This is the cardboard envelope of medium thickness containing the mystery item when it first arrived in the Vintage Kitchen in July 2021. For privacy purposes, pink marks cover the addresses of the sender and recipient.

Still in its same envelope in January 2024, it is time to reveal the mystery item…

The mystery item envelope as photoed in January 2024

Tucked inside the cardboard envelope is a plastic, turquoise-colored binder. The binder itself is not the lost item, but what’s inside the binder is. A turn of the cover reveals history from 100 years ago…

The binder holds fifteen pages of 1920s-era black-and-white photographs containing various scenes of rural family life in a country setting. Consisting of forty-seven individual images in total, the photographs were taped, or in some cases pasted, onto standard white copy paper and then slipped into plastic sleeves and secured in a three-ring binder.

The turquoise binder was clearly a modern addition, but the photographs themselves are originals. It’s easy to see that the photos had been removed at one point in time from a more traditional photo album. Black pieces of paper are attached to some edges, old tape clings to corners and remnants of prior placement in a black-paged photo album are evident.

Handwritten notes are included next to most of the photographs identifying first names, town names, a date, or a general situation, like the one above that says Bud, Florence & Ken out camping. But none of the notes include references to a specific state, country, legible last name or any major scenic sites. Flipping through the pages reveal more photos of babies, dogs, cars, cats. There are houses and train tracks, rolling hills and weathered wood. There are women on horseback, men in overalls, girls in summer dresses, boys hunting in the snow.

There are blurry candid shots and more formal, posed group shots. Several faces reappear in different settings. A building evolves in various stages of construction. There are men in fedora hats and women in fur coats. There’s a foal and a waterfall. A travel trailer. A canoe. A swing hanging from a laundry line. There’s a baby in a bath bucket and a woman sitting on the hood of a car.

All the photographs were taken outdoors and feature different seasons. Many photos feature one specific man in particular. A man in overalls. That’s him in the center of the photo below.

Page after page, faces unfold.

People are named Al… Bill… Bessie… Bud… Merwyn… Lou…Florence. Towns are labeled Garrison and Philipsburg. One photo refers to the “Minnesota Relatives.” A dog is named Laddie Boy.

The lost item is a one-hundred-year-old photo collection of a mystery family in a mystery location. Who are these people and how are they are connected to the Vintage Kitchen? Keep reading for the whole story from start to finish.

Back in 2008, when Angela discovered this photo album that had been left behind at the Staples where she was working in suburban Atlanta, there was no way to track down who it belonged to. It had been left at the self-serve copy area and contained no other information as to where it came from or who brought it in. There was no in-store job ticket attached to it. No Staples order form. No receipt dangling from an interior page. There was just the binder – plastic, turquoise, holding onto fifteen pages of 100-year-old photographs.

Angela at Staples in 2008. Learn more about her in Chapter 2.

Knowing how sentimental old photographs can be, Angela kept the binder in the back room of Staples for safekeeping in hopes that someone would realize that they’d forgotten it and come right back for it. Days, weeks, months went by. The binder sat unclaimed on the shelf in the back room. Periodically during that first year, Angela would thumb through the photos and try to connect one of the handwritten first names to a customer list in the Staples database.

Bill, Florence, Bud, Al are pretty common names throughout the country, but particularly in the South. Searching by first name alone turned out to be a fruitless task. With no legible last names to search, no specific city and state location to pinpoint on a map, and no understanding of the context of the collection as a whole, Angela had no clear-cut way to track down the owner of the left-behind photographs using just the minimal information offered in the handwritten notes. Her only hope was that owner would return to the store to claim the binder. A year went by. A clean-up and reorganization of the back room was issued by Staples management. Angela, concerned that the binder might be misplaced or tossed into the trash during the reorganization took it home so that she could continue to search for its owner.

One year stretched into five years and then into ten and still Angela was no closer to finding out who might have left the photographs behind. Although the story of the turquoise binder didn’t change much in that decade, Angela’s life changed quite a bit. She got married and had a baby. And then she had another baby and another one after that. In that decade, she went from being a single girl working at Staples to a mom with a family of five to care for. By her side through all those life changes was the lost item. In close reach always, in case an important clue or a new lead might reveal itself, the binder became a part of Angela’s life, a puzzling research project that she returned to again and again.

Meanwhile, in another southern state, while Angela was busy raising her family and trying to solve the mystery of the binder filled with photographs, I was busy writing about history, antiques, and vintage recipes. In March 2018, I wrote a blog post, sharing a recipe that had long been a part of springtime/Eastertime menus for generations of my family. The recipe was for Rhubarb Custard Pie – a seasonal dessert that combines Betty Crocker’s 1950s rhubarb custard filling recipe with my Great-Grandpa Bacon’s homemade pie crust recipe.

Rhubarb Custard Pie – a family tradition every spring.

In the post, in addition to the recipe, I shared the story of Great-Grandpa Bacon and his wife, Dolly, who lived in rural Montana during the early to late 20th century. Married in their early 20s, Bacon worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad, a job that took him and his new bride to two rural areas in Montana – Goldcreek and Philipsburg. It was a brave and adventurous new life for them, started at a time when Montana, still young and precarious itself, saw its most difficult years in history.

Montana Homestead Poster circa 1914. Read more about the challenges of Montana homesteading here.

Challenges stemming from WWI, the over-grazing of prairies during the homestead boom, and the subsequent agricultural decline coupled with the wild, unmanaged landscape, towns located few and far between, and the tricky navigation of the unfamiliar ins and outs of remote living, made Bacon and Dolly’s decision to build a life in rural Montana all the more courageous. Dolly was born and raised in Seattle, and Bacon was from St. Paul, MN, both sizeable cities with over hundreds of thousands of residents in the early 19th century. Their new Montana life would take them to communities with populations of less than 2000 people where they had to rely on their own wit and willpower to survive.

Along with the recipe, in the blog post, I detailed Dolly and Bacon’s unusual life in Big Sky Country. I didn’t have any photos of them depicting their early years in Montana, so to help visually tell their story I added a lot of research about what was happening in the state in the 1920s when Dolly and Bacon moved there. I also shared the family story about how Dolly and Bacon’s first house, after they were married, was two railcars gifted to them by Northern Pacific Railroad. A gesture offered by the company so that Dolly and Bacon could immediately set up homekeeping in their new surroundings.

A 1930s era Northern Pacific Railroad poster in Chapter 3 was a big clue about the location of the story.

Definitely an unusual start to their marriage, Bacon and Dolly thrived in Montana and embraced everything about their rural railroad life. Bacon worked as a train depot clerk in Goldcreek and then as a conductor on a transportation line for livestock and mining equipment in Philipsburg.

Now an abandoned track these are recent photos of the train line running through Philipsburg with views that Dolly and Bacon would have seen on a daily basis. Photos courtesy of D & D Travel.

Dolly set up house in the railcars, learned to bake bread, and wrote poetry. They had three babies, two girls and a boy. They built a house and a garden near the tracks where Bacon worked. They hiked in the hills, fished in the streams, and ate fresh-caught trout for breakfast, Dolly’s bread for lunch and Bacon’s homemade pies for dessert. They fell deeply in love with each other, with Montana, and with the life that they made. For fifty-five years, Dolly and Bacon called Montana home, never imagining living somewhere else than the paradise that surrounded them. In 1975, Bacon passed away from a heart attack at the age of 78. Dolly followed five years later in 1980 at the age of 82. They are buried next to each other in the local cemetery in Philipsburg. Even in death their hearts never left the place that they loved.

The rhubarb custard pie recipe received some interest from readers, but not nearly as much as the story of Bacon and Dolly. In 2018, their photo above became one of the most favorited of the year on our Vintage Kitchen social media accounts.

In 2021, Angela still searching for some helpful snippet of information that might lead her to the original owner of the binder, decided to contact a Facebook group that specialized in old-fashioned handwriting. She thought that they might be able to help decode some of the hard-to-read words that accompanied a few of the photos.

The Facebook group was more than happy to help. Within a quick amount of time, they connected words from the handwritten notes in the photo album to words and phrases found online in my blog post about rhubarb custard pie. Bac, Philipsburg, train depot, lived in boxcars, and finally the clincher… Dolly Day… lept out at the group. All threads strong enough to cause Angela to reach out to the Vintage Kitchen via the blog, she sent an email to see if the photos might be connected to the recipe and to the story of Bacon and Dolly. Along with her inquiry, she sent some photos from the binder, this one included…

When I opened Angela’s email, I was greeted by a photo of Bacon himself. In his younger years. In his beloved overalls. In his rural Montana. With Dolly by his side. And just like that, after 13 years of Angela’s diligence, time, and attention to finding the owner of the lost item, her inquiry was confirmed. Yes, indeed the photos were a part of the Vintage Kitchen – firmly rooted to the rhubarb custard pie recipe and to the Montana life of Bacon and Dolly Day.

A windfall for a genealogy lover like me, it was incredible to see personal photographs of someone I had heard about but never met, wrote about couldn’t completely visualize, and whose recipe was in constant use in my kitchen. When the turquoise binder arrived in the mail, Dolly, Bacon and their Montana life lept off the pages.

Suddenly the photo album made all sorts of sense. The woman on the horse? That was Dolly. The two men holding babies? That was Bacon and his twin brother Willis, who in turn, were holding their babies, Dolores and Willis Jr., both born in the same year (1922). The house with the long angle? That was the train depot in Philipsburg where Bacon worked.

The waterfall is part of Skalkaho Pass, a point of interest In southwestern Montana that was mentioned in the photo album but misspelled. The building with everyone hanging out the window? That was the first house that Dolly and Bacon built from scratch with their own hands. The car with the motor home attached? That’s how Bacon and Dolly went camping. And the “Minnesota Relatives?” Those were Bacon’s brothers and sisters and their families visiting from Bacon’s home state.

Bacon and Dolly’s life unfolded in the photos page by page. Every family story known about them as a couple, their kids and their unique life in Montana was now here in visual format offering new insight into them and their experiences. In 2018 when I wrote the rhubarb pie post, I had only the one photograph of Dolly and Bacon in their senior years to share. Now, there are forty-seven more.

As I stated from the beginning of this story, the Vintage Kitchen is connected to the lost photos, but they don’t belong here. I wasn’t the one who pulled them from the pages of an old black photo album. I didn’t compile them in the turquoise binder. Nor was I the one to leave them in the suburban Atlanta Staples in 2008. Technically, Great-Grandpa Bacon and Great-Grandma Dolly aren’t even related to me.

Bacon and Dolly are the grandparents of my mom’s first husband. My brother, sister and I have the same mom but different dads. Bacon and Dolly are part of my brother and sister’s paternal ancestry line which is made up of Midwest and Pacific Northwest roots.

Both my brother and sister have memories of Dolly and Bacon and they both share a special affinity for Montana. Knowing that they would be so excited to learn about these never-before-seen photographs of their beloved great-grandparents, I couldn’t wait to share the story with them. I also couldn’t wait to share this whole story here on the blog too. Especially since I had already written about Bacon’s pie crust recipe. Had the family rhubarb pie recipe never been published, the Facebook group would never have found the Vintage Kitchen and Angela would never have contacted me, so it was very exciting to be able to continue telling the story of Bacon and Dolly here as well.

In the summer of 2021, when the photos arrived from Angela, the pandemic was still wreaking havoc on socialization plans. Although the idea of flying out to Seattle to meet my brother and sister was definitely the way I wanted to deliver the photos to them, I didn’t want to tie up this lovely gift from history wrapped in a case of Covid. So while waiting for the virus to calm down a bit, I decided to start telling the story on the blog. Since both my brother and sister read the blog, and since I didn’t want to spoil the ultimate surprise, I never mentioned anything to them about the photos or Angela or Montana. Hints in Chapters 1-4 of A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts were all filtered through a veil of mystery so that my brother and sister wouldn’t be able to guess that the lost item had anything to do with them.

Fast forward through 2021, 2022, and 2023. The timing never lined up quite right to fly out and finish the story. A six-month house hunt, the South to North move, and 1750 House renovations wound up delaying the surprise far longer than I ever anticipated. But if we’ve learned anything so far in all these chapters about the lost item, it’s that timing is everything to this story and in its weird and wonky way has linked all these people in all these places together at the most appropriate moments.

In January 2024, the right time presented itself. My niece was getting married in Seattle. A family wedding was the perfect occasion to share the story of the lost item and to finally deliver the 100-year-old photographs bound together in their plastic, turquoise bnder.

Before I left for Seattle, I had five copies made of one of the photos from the binder, so that I could frame them and give them to each of my nieces and my brother and sister. I chose a photograph of Bacon, newly married, age 24, where’s he looking straight at the camera. There are rolling hills in the background, part of a rustic building at his shoulder, a patch of corn growing next to a building behind him. He’s wearing his signature overalls. There’s a look of contentment on his face. A welcoming smile just about to bloom.

I had the photos reproduced at my local Staples, an homage to Angela and also to the lost item. While waiting in line to be helped, I glanced over at the self-serve copy area, at the bare tables next to each station, at the hard surfaces, sharp corners, and the utilitarian grey, beige, and black colors that covered that part of the store. I thought about the turquoise binder sitting by itself in such an environment. I thought about Dolly and Bacon tucked inside and how the environment of a modern-day Staples was so far removed from their wild Montana countryside, yet also had become such an integral part of this story.

In 2018, going back and forth with Angela via text after the photos arrived in the Vintage Kitchen, I asked her what it felt like to put the binder in the mail after a 13-year journey with it. She admitted to tearing up a little. “I felt appreciated and blessed. To be able to provide so many people connected to this item with a sense of joy and happiness makes this such a special thing to be a part of.”

When it was my turn to be helped at the counter, the Staples employee was a bit flustered and explained that it had been a busy day and they were running behind with custom print jobs, so I’d have to leave my photo with them overnight and pick up the copies the next day. I hesitated. Bacon had come such a long way. His photograph was in my hand about to be given over. What if… I thought. What if something happens overnight at Staples. What if I never get the photo back. What if…

Clearly tired from her day, and sensing my hesitation, the Staples employee took the photo, popped it into an envelope, and attached it to a work order all in one quick motion while asking if she could help me with anything else. I wanted to tell her the story. The whole story. Starting all the way back at the beginning in 2008 with Angela in the Staples in Georgia. But the line behind me was long, and I got the sense I wasn’t speaking to someone like Angela who would care so wholeheartedly about old photos and lost items.

A detail had escaped my attention until the day before the wedding. It came in the form of my niece’s wedding ring. She designed it herself so that she could include a family heirloom in the setting that had been passed down on her side of the family for generations. The heirloom was a blue Montana sapphire. It had been mined from a local quarry near Philipsburg, Montana. The sapphire had been a gift from Bacon to his daughter, Florence on her 16th birthday in 1940..

Photos clockwise from left to right: Florence in Montana, about 10 years old circa 1934. A professional photograph of my niece’s Montana sapphire wedding ring. And a photo of her ring and wedding band taken at home after the wedding.

The day after the wedding, over trays of homemade enchilada casserole at my brother’s house, I shared the story of the lost item with my sister, brother, and nieces. I presented the turquoise binder and gave everyone their framed photographs. It was one of the loveliest family dinners I’ve ever had. We all marveled at the tenacity of Angela, the scenes of Montana spread around the table, and the good fortune that these photographs were not just thrown out in a dumpster sixteen years ago. My brother told me about a railroad key of Bacon’s that he had in storage and my sister told me about a booklet that she has of poems and musings about Montana written by Dolly. New story snippets and memories popped up in conversation as the photos floated around the table. My brother immediately called an aunt from that side of the family who lived in Atlanta to see if she was the one who left the binder at Staples. She was as surprised to hear about the story as we were and said she had no idea who the binder might have belonged to and how it would have wound up at Staples.

If you think about how fragile a paper photograph is, it’s easy to get quickly overwhelmed with scenarios that could have gone wrong in this story. They could have been destroyed a million different times in Montana alone over the course of a century. Not to mention the fact that they somehow made it to Atlanta. Then got lost. And then potentially could have been thrown out in the trash had kind-hearted Angela not cared enough to rescue them.

Something could have happened to them or to Angela in her thirteen years of time spent with them. Or something could have happened to them in the airplane when they were mailed to the Vintage Kitchen from Georgia or to the UPS truck that delivered them. Once, I received them, they became part of a big move, a typical life experience that often sees items get misplaced, lost or forgotten. And then for three years after that, they sat on a shelf of a 274-year-old house undergoing construction, room by room.

The view from the boat on the way to my brother’s house.

After that, they crossed the country again via plane, traveled in three different cars, and then on a boat to reach their final destination. Anything could have happened to the photographs in that timeframe by any sort of man-made or natural event experienced by any one of us involved. But it didn’t. Fate was on their side. All along, time took care of them, nurtured them. So that eventually, their story about time long ago was able to tell another story about time today. One generation growing from another.

Bacon with mare and foal. Montana circa 1920s.

On the airplane, coming back from the wedding I had to time to think about the whole story of the lost item from start to finish. Now knowing more about Bacon and Dolly, seeing their young lives evolve through photographs, I could see glimmers of their spirit in my brother and sister. The rugged, wild island where my brother lives, and that he absolutely loves, is his modern-day version of paradise just like Bacon’s wild, rugged Montana. My sister, our family’s star baker, is an incredible talent in the kitchen just like Dolly was with her bread and Bacon with his pies.

There is a lot to love about this story… the kindness of strangers, a lost item found, a family reconnected to its past, an heirloom saved from the brink of obscurity, an intimate look at a unique aspect of history, a mystery solved. But I think the thing that I love most is that ultimately, it was a simple, humble vintage recipe that connected all these threads and all these people.

I return again to the quote… “What’s meant for you will never miss you, and that which misses you was never meant for you.” It’s impossible to try to rationalize or explain the sheer amount of good fortune that these one hundred-year-old family photographs were graced with over the past sixteen years and beyond. I can’t logically detail why or how certain people came into the story when they did or why timing stretched out this love story long enough to finally be added to a new generation’s love story on their wedding weekend. All I can do is say thank you, to the universe, to fate, to Angela for clearly demonstrating that these photos were indeed meant to never miss us.

Cheers to Angela, a modern-day angel, for not only saving these photographs, but also for taking such tender care of them, and persistently working for over a decade to find their home. Cheers to Bacon and Dolly for continuing to be a source of interest and inspiration in our family and in our kitchens. And cheers to all you patient Vintage Kitchen blog readers who stuck with me through the lengthy and sporadic telling of this very long story.

There are only two questions left that still linger. How did the 100-year-old photographs taken in Montana that belong to a family in the Pacific Northwest wind up in a suburb of Atlanta, GA? And who wrote the notes next to each photograph?

Maybe there is still more to this story yet to come…

Growing a Fragrant Year: February’s Helpful Hazel and the Greenhouse Diaries

Published on February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen7 Comments

Witch hazel illustration by Leonie Bell circa 1960s

With a scent ranging from sweet yeasted bread to bubblegum, the centuries-old Hamamelis virginiana (aka the common witch hazel) kicks off Month #1 in this year’s Greenhouse Diaries series. In case you missed our introductory post last month, our theme for 2024 is a Fragrant Year, where we’ll be sharing twelve months of perfumed plants, flowers, and trees that have the power to add a calming, aromatic atmosphere to gardens big and small.

Inspired by the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell and their idea that planting a scented garden benefits not only one garden but many surrounding it, it’s an exciting project that I hope will bring some discussions and awareness about the power of plants and the perfume they provide.

Acting as guinea pigs and testing fields, the greenhouse and gardens of 1750 House are the experiment stations to see how Helen and Leonie’s suggestions work in our northern landscape. Although we are gardening in New England (Zone 6) and striving for a natural and historical outdoor environment appropriate to the history of the house, it’s my goal with this series to feature fragrant specimens that will grow in other parts of the country too, in case you are looking to augment your own green space with some pretty aromatics.

As I write this, the last of our 11″ inches of snow has just melted and signs of spring are stirring in the daffodils poking through in the front corner bed. Planted long before we ever moved in, I’ve come to rely on those flowers as little time clocks signaling that a new season is close at hand even though nighttime temps are still in the 20s and 30s. Spring, indeed, is happening. Soon.

In the beginning chapters of The Fragrant Year, Helen and Leonie write about the “optimistically planned” winter garden, which if done correctly should “offer us flowers with various shrubs to brighten the dull months.” One of their suggestions for wintertime color and scent is one of the oldest medicinal plants in the New World and a resident of the entire eastern half of the country from Canada to Florida.

Although technically considered a shrub or a small tree, when left to its own devices, common witch hazel can grow up to 30 feet tall, and is one of just a few plants that blooms in the dormant stages of winter. Brightening up the landscape with fringe-like ribbons of golden flowers, it adds bright color to the garden, shelter for birds, and a food source for winter pollinators like the dagger moth that shivers and shudders its way through the cold season.

The common witch hazel in winter. Photo courtesy of TN Nursery

Requiring moist soil, sun to partial shade, and an acidic to neutral PH level, witch hazel is an easy-going, practically carefree planting that grows one to two feet in height each year. Ideal for sunny spots, woodland edges or sloping hills where soil erosion is a concern, the helpful hazel compliments a variety of different landscapes in a variety of different states.

Last year, we had to make the tough decision to bring a tree service in to cut down two trees that were precariously leaning in the backyard. The salve for having to cut down two old trees was knowing that we would plant at least two new ones in their place.

Surrounded by woodlands on two sides and facing a community garden in front, 1750 House is tucked in between acres of beautiful naturally-kept trees, including five elms and two cedars that are over 100 years old. While we have no shortage of very tall trees, we do have a bit of haphazard mid-range tree coverage that reflects over 270 years of garden endeavors executed by previous 1750 House residents. Privet, fruit trees, ornamental shrubs, wild natives, ornamental grasses and a few invasive species all compete for attention to the eye. We are on a mission to corral all these growers into a more cohesive vista so that they can work together to provide interesting layers at different heights to create a unique blend of shapes and colors throughout the year.

The appeal of planting a witch hazel shrub in the backyard is the pretty array of color it will add at eye level in the winter when most of the woodlands boast shades of grey, snowy whites, evergreen, berry reds and blacks. I also love the medicinal factor that witch hazel offers and the future opportunities it will bring later down the road to explore some homeopathic recipes.

Humphrey’s Witch Hazel Oil was made in New Hampshire in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Befitting a proper and useful kitchen garden of a house built in the 18th century, witch hazel in all its forms, from leaf to stem to flower, has been cultivated for hundreds of years for use in poultices, anti-inflammatory salves, and skincare maintenance. In New England, we have the area’s indigenous tribes to thank for teaching early settlers how to boil the bark for medicinal tinctures to heal coughs, colds, and inflammatory ailments. The leaves were used in wound care. The wood for making bows for hunting. By the 19th century, witch hazel became a key ingredient in the first mass-marketed skincare product – Pond’s Cold Cream – which debuted in 1846 under the name Golden Treasure.

Helen and Leonie offered another use too… clipping a few branches of witch hazel in winter and adding them to a vase along with some balsam sprigs for some invigorating indoor aromatherapy. Even though it can take up to six years for the first blooms of witch hazel to appear, I can already imagine such a bouquet.

Young fruit of the witch hazel shrub. Photo: Katja Schulz

While I have ordered plenty of garden seeds online before, ordering a shrub off the internet was an entirely new experience. As I learned, live agricultural specimens like this one are shipped in timing with the appropriate planting season. So the witch-hazel shrub I selected from Tenesssee won’t arrive until spring even though it was ordered in late winter. That’s a handy system that sets you up for success from the beginning.

So the first month of our Fragrant Year series starts off with a to-be continued. We’ll check back in on our witch hazel planting adventures in spring when the shrubling arrives. In the meantime, if anyone else has any experience working with witch hazel, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Please share them in the comments section.

Cheers to Helen and Leonie for their advice on adding winter color to the landscape and for the aromatic start to showcasing historic plants in the gardens at 1750 House. Until next month, happy gardening.

Other sights from the February greenhouse…

Not to be upstaged by the witch hazel, and just in time for our first Fragrant Year post, Liz Lemon is blooming and filling the greenhouse with her lovely citrus scents.

Italy’s Chicken Canzanese and The Family of Artists Behind The Recipe

Published on February 11, 2024 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

It’s just the start of 2024, but here in the Vintage Kitchen, there is a finish line coming into view. This year we will be wrapping up a five-year project that first started here on the blog in 2020. I’m so happy to say welcome back to The International Vintage Recipe Tour.

What started out as an intended year-long project of cooking 50 recipes from 45 different countries in 2020 has now taken five years to complete just to the halfway mark. A pandemic, a tornado, a big cross-country move and 1750 House renovations have waylaid plans far more than ever anticipated, but this project has always been such a joy I never wanted to not finish it. So here we are, at the start of 2024 finishing things up from 2020.

For a quick recap and for anyone new to the blog, The International Vintage Recipe Tour takes home cooks and readers on an around-the-world adventure via the kitchen, as we cook our way through a collection of recipes featured in the 1971 New York Times International Cookbook.

the-new-york-times-international-cook-book — The vintage 1971 cookbook that launched the Vintage Recipe Tour.

Throughout the Tour, we are visiting 45 countries via the kitchen and making at least one traditional heritage food from each, sharing both the recipe and the cooking experience here on the blog. To add context to the food we are making, and to spark some new conversations around the table, every visit to a new destination is paired with a unique cultural story from that country’s history.

So far we’ve visited twenty-four countries via the kitchen on this tour… Armenia, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ceylon, China, Colombia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dahomey, Denmark, England, Fiji, France, Germany, Greece, Haiti, Hungary, India, Indonesia, and Israel. It’s been a whirlwind of fun, friendship and delicious food.

We chatted with an author and a food columnist via Armenia, met a descendant of the designer of the Statue of Liberty via Germany, and embraced our inner bula in Fiji. We discussed tropical architecture in Haiti, made floating paper lanterns to celebrate the Hungry Ghost Festival in China and donated funds from shop sales to help save the koalas injured in the Australian wildfires. We discussed women’s fashion in India, interviewed a Cuban-American farmer in Miami, and learned about a long-lost African-American dance in Dahomey. On the food front, we curried in Ceylon, baked Queen Mother’s Cake in Australia, made homemade mustard in Denmark, learned that not all fondue comes in a hot pot in Belgium, and took a much-needed virtual vacation to Corfu via Greece.

Our latest stop on the tour was Israel, which lined up with the 2021 holiday season. To celebrate we made a Hannukah wreath, cooked two recipes for dinner, and dove into the history of both the Jewish flag and the Jewish star. Now, our next stop on the International Vintage Recipe Tour takes us to Italy, one of the most beloved cuisines in the world. Here we’ll make a provincial meal meant for sharing and meet an artist whose family recipes formed the basis of a life-long passion with food. Welcome to Italy.

It’s impossible to write about Italy without writing about family. And you can’t write about this recipe, Chicken Canzanese without writing about a specific family. Like France and China, Italy is one of the largest chapters in the New York Times International Cookbook. There are literally dozens of recipes to choose from, a switch from some countries that had less than a handful.

Besides the long wait to get the Tour started again, the hardest part about starting up again with Italy was which recipe to choose and which cultural treasure to spotlight. Contenders in that department were Stanley Tucci’s gorgeous Searching for Italy show, the multi-generational novel The Florios of Siciliy and the genealogy of the love apple (aka the tomato). There were all the pastas and all the sauces, lovely vegetable side dishes, and quite a few desserts to pick from, but the recipe that I kept coming back to was a one-pot chicken dish that was credited to an artist.

Last fall, while visiting a local bookshop, I discovered a bright yellow 1970s Italian cookbook. To my sheer delight and surprise, it was written by the same artist mentioned in the New York Times International Cookbook. A quick peek inside revealed the same exact recipe that was also featured in the NYTimes cookbook. The same recipe by one artist in two different books. It was a sign. This was the right Italian recipe for the Tour and the right time to tell a story about a creative spirit, who also happened to be an Italian cookbook author.

The artist is Edward Giobbi, a second-generation Italian-American born in Connecticut in 1926. Still painting today from his home studio in Katonah, New York, at the age of 98, Edward’s lived his entire life in pursuit of art and food. The book that made him well-known in the culinary world was his Italian Family Cookbook, first published in 1971. Selling over 30,000 copies by the 1980s, it offered home cooks a sincerity that resonated on multiple levels when it came to preparing economical and creative meals in true Italian style. The recipe featured here today, the one that appears not only in Edward’s cookbook but also in the New York Times International Cookbook, is his Chicken Canzanese, a slow-simmered one-pot made of chicken, herbs, wine, spices, and prosciutto.

A lovely selection for these end-of-winter days when the weather is jockeying back and forth between spring-like temps and snowstorms, this recipe is both light and hearty, depending on the sides that accompany it. It’s easy to prepare, has a warm, rich, earthy fragrance thanks to the prosciutto, garlic, and herbs, and can definitely be labeled a healthy comfort food since it contains no added fat.

The cooking prep is also interesting. There is a cold water brine, a unique set of flavor pairings, and a few very precisely measured spices… twelve peppercorns… six whole cloves… two sage leaves. I always find precise measurements like this fascinating. What was the process that a cook went through to determine that perfect balance of six versus seven cloves or nine versus twelve peppercorns? Would three sage leaves as opposed to two send the whole meal over the edge?

Edward Giobbi, tasting and testing in his kitchen circa 1971. Image courtesy of The News Messenger. Aug 12, 1971

As it turns out, Edward’s style of cooking and how he first learned it was based on quality but also frugality. Growing up during the Great Depression taught him and his family the value of growing your own food and utilizing agricultural resources close to home. Nutrition was key to keeping everyone healthy. Nothing was wasted or under-appreciated. Every bit of joy that you could scrape from an experience mattered. As an adult, Edward approached food in much the same way.

In the NYTimes cookbook, the recipe for Chicken Canzanese is simply attributed to Ed Giobbi, the artist. But in Edward’s cookbook, Italian Family Cooking, it’s attributed to Edward’s mother by way of a woman who lived in Canzano, in the Abruzzi region of Italy.

The Abruzzo region of Italy. Photo courtesy of iStock.

Located in the middle of the boot, Italy’s beautiful Abruzzi/Abruzzo region borders the Adriatic Sea and also the Apennines Mountains, both of which provide ample agricultural opportunity. Canzano is 105 miles east of Rome, and 230 miles southeast of Florence, and although geographically considered central Italy, the culture and food traditions of this area mirror that of Southern Italy.

Abruzzo, Italy. Photo: Sterlinglanier Lanier.

Full of food specialties ranging from provincial fish soups to local lamb dishes to plates of handmade pasta the traditional foods of Abruzzo favor both its maritime and mountain environs. Incidentally, this area of Italy is also known for a food often consumed at weddings here in the US. It’s the birthplace of the pastel-colored, candy-coated Jordan Almond, also called Italian Confetti locally.

All the pretty pastel shades of a Jordan Almond.

Edward’s parents immigrated to the US in the early 1900s first to Pennsylvania and then to Connecticut where they labored in factories and mills. Even though they both just had a third-grade level education, his parents had an appreciation for food, art and music which made a strong impression on Edward during his childhood. The Giobbi family kitchen would come alive at night and on weekends with the scents and flavors of his parent’s home country.

Once he left home to pursue his art, his mom’s heirloom recipes became a vital part of the creative process as he perfected each one in his own kitchen, practicing them over and over again, until they met her standards and his memories. That dedication to good food and good eating, combined with artistic sojourns to stay with extended family in Italy sealed his love of cooking indelibly.

By the time Edward married and had his own family, preparing daily meals was a pleasure equal to painting. In his children, he instilled a similar joy. Art and cooking became a throughline that ran strong in the new generation of the Giobbi family members.

Apart from the myriad of wonderful traditional Italian recipes in Edward’s cookbook, the illustrations stand out with vibrant appeal and eye-catching charm. The art was executed not by a hired freelancer or a publishing industry dynamo. It wasn’t executed by a professional food photographer or a graphic design studio. Instead, the illustrations for his cookbook were illustrated by a collection of painters entirely new to the world – his children, Cham, Lisa and Gena who at the time ranged in age from six to nine.

Edward gave his kids no direction when he asked them to paint pictures for the cookbook other than to say “draw a fish, or a soup pot or a bottle of wine.” Each of his artists offered their own interpretation.

Whimsical and sweet, Edward Giobbi’s Italian Family Cookbook was indeed, in all ways, a family affair from kids to parents to extended relatives. It didn’t stop at this cookbook either. Edward went on to write another successful cookbook, Eat Right, Eat Well: The Italian Way (1985) and his band of illustrators grew up to pursue their own careers in art, dance, music and food science.

In keeping with the Giobbi clan’s combined love of the kitchen, nothing seems more fitting than presenting this recipe on a Sunday night when family dinner rules the kitchen in most Italian households. Named for the town in which it hails, Chicken Canzanese is a meal intended for communal family dining. Simple to make, it’s a two-step process that involves a one-hour wet brine and forty minutes of cooking time. True to Edward’s nature and his mother’s style of cooking, it’s made of simple ingredients and offers a bevy of creativity in the side dishes in which you choose to serve with it. More on those thoughts follow the recipe.

Edward Giobbi’s Chicken Canzanese

Serves 4

One 3 lb chicken, cut in pieces

2 sage leaves

2 bay leaves

1 clove garlic, sliced lengthwise

6 whole cloves

2 sprigs fresh rosemary or 1/2 teaspoon dried

12 peppercorns, crushed

1 hot red pepper, broken and seeded (optional) or 1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes

1/4 lb prosciutto, sliced 1/2 inch thin or one 4oz package of pre-sliced prosciutto*

1/2 cup dry white wine

1/4 cup water

Salt for brine (see note)

Place the chicken pieces in a mixing bowl and add cold water to cover and salt to taste. *Note: I used a large mixing bowl and 1/8 cup of sea salt to 6 cups of water. Cover with plastic wrap and store in the fridge for 1 hour.

Drain the water and rinse the chicken pieces completely before patting dry with paper towels.

Arrange the chicken pieces in one layer in a skillet. Add the sage, bay leaves, garlic, whole cloves, rosemary, peppercorns and red pepper. Cut the prosciutto into small cubes and sprinkle it over the chicken. *Note: If using pre-sliced prosciutto, remove all the paper or plastic sheets between each slice. Stack the prosciutto one on top of the other, and cube the whole stack at once.

Add the wine and water. Do not add any additional salt, since the prosciutto will season the dish. Cover and simmer 40 minutes. Once the chicken has cooked to an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees. Uncover and cook briefly until the sauce is reduced slightly. Serve hot.

Rustic and earthy, Chicken Canzanese is tender and full of subtle flavors. The broth itself is fairly salty on its own thanks to the simmered prosciutto, but soak it up with a piece of crusty bread, and the briny flavor mellows. There were no serving suggestions mentioned in Edward’s recipe nor the NYTimes, but the broth would be lovely tossed in a warm bowl of pasta, spinach, peas, potatoes or mushrooms. If you are feeling decadent you could add a dash of cream to the broth to balance all the flavors. As Edward says in the introduction…”Cook the food in this book with a free hand, using your own creativity with the freshest ingredients you can get.”

Collected by museums and galleries around the world, throughout Edward’s long art career his style has varied…

Summer Shower, Pescara, Italy. Edward Giobbi. 1951

Hanover, Triptych. Edward Giobbi. Exact date unknown – possibly 1970s.

He dislikes labels or being lumped into a certain type of painting, but he one thing Edward consistently strives for in his art instead is honesty. The same could be said for his cooking. All of his recipes are celebrations of local eating. They reflect riding the highs and lows of economy, of balancing cooking constraints with bounty, and the importance of identifying local resources. His recipes are interesting, creative, nourishing. They are of the earth and of the moment. I think that’s what makes Italian food so appealing. It’s a cuisine rooted in a waste-not culture that appreciates what’s right there in front – all the bounty that the earth can offer.

Fall Still Life- Edward Giobbi. Photo courtesy of Chroma Fine Art Gallery. Find out more about this painting here.

My favorite piece in Edward’s catalog of work is this one. I think it’s the most food and family-like of all his art. In my interpretation of it, I can see his whole entire world. His whole lineage in mixed media. There are blue fish in the sea at the bottom right. A mountainous landscape in the middle. There’s red for blood, life, wine and energy. I see flowers, woodland foraging, and garden soil. In my mind, that blob of brown represents all the possibilities that might grow from a simple swatch of ground. And the tree. The beautiful, exuberant tree surrounded by dots of confetti-like splatters and stars. That’s the Giobbi tree. The one that represents the vitality of nature, the sparkle of life, of wife, of children all rolled up in one. I could be reading too much into it. Maybe it’s just what the title says - Fall Still Life. Maybe it’s an autumn landscape in Canzano, Italy. Or a pairing of items Edward arranged in his home studio in Katonah, New York. Maybe it represents a lot more or even possibly a lot less. Or maybe… just maybe… it’s the word, the work, that Edward’s been striving for all along.. honesty.

Cheers to Edward for sharing his family’s Italian heritage with us here in America via books, art and storytelling. Cheers to his kids, Cham, Lisa and Gena for their fantastic illustrations. And finally, cheers to the unnamed woman in Canzano, who passed this recipe along. I wish we knew your name so we could credit you properly for the delicious dish.

If you’d like to catch up with the recipe tour from the very beginning days in 2020, start here or click on any of the country links mentioned above to visit those specific posts.

Next up on the International Vintage Recipe Tour, it’s a trip to Jamaica via the kitchen. Hope you’ll join us!

Welcome To A Fragrant Year: The Greenhouse Diaries Return for New Growing Adventures

Published on January 27, 2024February 28, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen6 Comments

The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024.

Last year, our first year as greenhouse owners and New England residents, we focused on winter gardening from December through May and all the possibilities that a warm greenhouse could offer in a cold landscape. We drew inspiration from Katharine Sergeant Angell White, a lifelong lover of the natural world who also happened to be a marvelous writer, a founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, and the beloved wife of E.B White.

Katharine Sergeant Angell White (1892-1977)

Her 1977 book Onward & Upward in the Garden, featured a collection of horticultural essays that highlighted her ability to embrace challenges by finding joy and solace in the certain uncertainties. Something that all gardeners must face when it comes to designing a pleasing landscape, in Katharine’s case, it was the long Maine winters that were a struggle for her spirit which yearned to be out in the garden digging and clipping, pruning, and propagating. She also had much to say about the confusing advice of garden experts and her own thoughtful attempts of trying to create the garden of her dreams. Her writing was full of spirit, humor and opinion when it came to detailing plans, recommending books and seed catalogs, and offering advice on growing plants and flowers both indoors and out. She was inspiration enough for us to start experimenting with our first winter growing season. Cold weather aside, we had Katharine on our side, lending a unique empathy and encouragement that fueled our desire to get out and grow things regardless of the weather, our experience level or the unseasonability of what we most wanted to achieve.

Our plan last year was to get a head start on establishing garden beds for 1750 House, so we focused mainly on forcing seeds and plants to sprout, bud and bloom early. Using 33 different plants, flowers and herbs as trial-run guinea pigs, we accomplished our goals with a fair amount of success and a few setbacks as we tested the physical capabilities of the greenhouse and grew our garden knowledge.

A greenhouse success – the joy of growing collard greens in 2023

This time, a year wiser, we are reducing the number of overall plants in the greenhouse to just focus on the proven winners that grew well both in the greenhouse and in the garden beds last spring, summer and fall. And to keep things interesting, we are launching a new experiment. This year, we are leaving extra room in the greenhouse to try our hand at growing a new type of perennial garden for year-round enjoyment… a landscape full of plants, flowers and trees that carry a scent.

Marvelously scented magnolia blossoms dotted our landscape down South.

When we lived in the South, we were surrounded by a wide variety of aromatic flowers that made our time there all the more memorable because of the beautiful perfume that continuously lingered in the air. The scent of night-blooming gardenias and fragrant magnolias swirled around our dinner parties. The heat of summer brought heavy humidity but also the delicate, sweet aromas of climbing Carolina jessamine. Roses in every scent and shade toppled and tumbled over hedgerows and brick walls. It was a lovely layer of landscape design that I had never really thought about until we had experienced it firsthand. Of course, we won’t be able to recreate an exact aromatic Southern garden here in New England since it’s a very different climate from there to here, but there are plenty of other options in the Northeast to explore for similar effect thanks to our new inspiration.

Here to guide the 2024 Greenhouse Diaries in our aromatic endeavors is the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. Month by month, in words and drawings this book details how to grow specific types of plants and flowers that will continuously unfold new scents in the garden season by season, even in the winter months.

Praised for being the first of its modern kind, The Fragrant Year was lauded both for its scope and its practical application, as well as its healthful benefits. In the opening chapter Helen writes… “if our gardens today were more often planned as fragrant retreats and our rooms were frequently perfumed with bowls of spicy pinks, bunches of aromatic herbs, vases of fragrant roses, and jars of potpourri, perhaps we would not have to depend so much on tranquilizers to hold us together in this frantic, fast-paced world.”

Helen wrote that in 1967 but it is still so applicable today. The world is still frantic and fast-paced. People still look to medicine to calm their nerves. But we think Helen’s theory is pretty wise – there is something much more natural, more gentle, more joyful in tackling frantic nerves and fast paces with this sort of approach instead. It is lovely to think that by selecting a few handfuls of scented botanicals and thoughtfully adding them to the landscape we might not only help create a more calm environment for ourselves but also for the community around us. Who knows what sort of impact that small gesture could have on a greater world.

A prolific writer of gardening books throughout the 20th century, Helen was no stranger to the power of plants. Along with penning a newspaper column titled Our Gardens Within and Without during the 1920s and 1930s, she also wrote for all the well-known women’s magazines including House & Garden, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes & Gardens, and House Beautiful. In between all that she wrote/edited over fifty books on various gardening topics throughout her long and lengthy career.

Born in New Jersey, Helen spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia, PA and Westport, CT where she experimented with gardening projects of all sorts both indoors and out. Her most well-known book was one on caring for African violets published in the 1940s but she was a beloved and trusted authority on a variety of horticultural topics throughout her life. Working with Leonie on several different projects, it was in the 1950s that they learned they shared a mutual love of aromatic botanicals. Upon discovering this, the idea for The Fragrant Year was quick to spark but it took Helen and Leonie ten years of dedicated research and trial-and-error gardening experiments before their book was finally published.

Leonie Bell in the garden. Photograph courtesy of monticello.org by way of Rev. Douglas T. Seidel

Like Helen, Leonie Bell (1924-1996) lived and gardened in suburban Philadelphia. In addition to being a well-respected botanical illustrator, she was also known as a rose expert. Contributing her expertise to several rose garden books published during the 20th century, Leonie was often referred to as a rose genealogist since she had a knack for discovering/uncovering heirloom roses from the past that had been misnamed or believed to be no longer in existence. At one point, her own personal garden contained over 200 different types of roses, most of them old-fashioned heirloom varieties.

If you are ever in Virginia, you can see the impact Leonie made at the Leonie Bell Rose Garden at Thomas Jeffferson’s Tufton Farm, which features a tribute to both Leonie’s legacy and the history of North American rose breeding.

Much sought after in the world of botanical illustration, what’s interesting about Leonie’s art is that she was self-taught. Her intrinsic knowledge of the anatomy of plants combined with her studies at the School of Horticulture in Ambler, PA led her to closely look at botanical subjects from all angles. That well-rounded vantage point carried through to her drawings which shine with scientific detail but also personality.

Excited to share a year full of fragrance here on the blog, each month we’ll feature a new scented flower or plant recommended by Helen and Leonie and detail our gardening experiences as we incorporate twelve new aromatic additions into the landscape at 1750 House. Hopefully, you’ll find this information equally inspiring and insightful too. It would be lovely if we could all experience the calming nature of a scented garden together.

Our next Greenhouse Diaries post will introduce our first fragrant botanical, but in the meantime, here’s a quick update on improvements we made to the greenhouse over the summer and a current list of what’s growing in the greenhouse now…

Current Occupants

As of mid-January, the greenhouse is halfway full with overwintering geraniums, vinca vine, and dracaena spikes from the summer garden. Six different types of succulents, a coffee plant, a pineapple sage cutting from our summer plantings, and Liz Lemon (our five-year-old lemon tree) fill out the rest of the space alongside a batch of newly started seeds… collards, broccoli, beets and four different types of salad greens.

Winter Plastic Wrap

This isn’t a new improvement, but we are on Year No. 2 of dressing the greenhouse in a winter coat – aka wrapping it entirely in a layer of thick plastic – to keep the heat in and protect the plants from drafts during rain, sleet, and snowstorms. The plastic, a temporary solution for the coldest months gets removed in early spring, folded up, and stored in the basement. Once the temperatures drop below 45 in the fall, we put the plastic back on for the season. Aesthetically, it’s not the prettiest site but it gets the job done and keeps our overwintering plants and new seedlings happy and warm. We weren’t sure how the plastic was going to hold up from year to year, but so far it’s nice to see that it is still working just as well. To learn more about this winterization system, see last year’s post here.

Thanks to the plastic wrap, everything stayed warm and dry inside during our most recent January 2024 snowstorm.

New Electrical

Over the summer we added an electrical outlet inside the greenhouse and buried the wiring underground. This was a big (and much safer) improvement from running an extension cord across the yard between the greenhouse and the workshop, which is how we handled things last winter. This new addition is an outdoor-rated 110V 15 amp circuit box which is just what we need to power the heater and lights.

A New Heater

A new mini space heater replaced the tall radiator-style heater used last winter. This smaller size opens up more room to move around the greenhouse and fits nicely on a bottom shelf tucked out of the way when not in use. It has a safety feature that turns the heater off automatically if it tipples over or if any excess moisture drips inside. When the greenhouse reaches a certain temperature, it also automatically turns off to save energy and to keep the plants from overheating.

Normally the heater sits on the pea gravel floor of the greenhouse so that it efficiently heats all areas from bottom to top, but to photo it for this post I put it on one of the higher shelves for a better view. Please note: your greenhouse heater should never be this close to any plants as the proximity to the heat will cause the leaves to shrivel and could become a fire hazard. Any greenhouse heater should have a wide radius that is completely free and clear of other objects.

By using this smaller unit, we don’t have to run out and adjust the heat as the temperature changes over the course of the day, like we had to do last year. Also, we readjusted our required heat temperature in the greenhouse. Instead of keeping it in the mid-70s like last year, we lowered it to 55 degrees, in hopes that the cooler temp will keep spider mites at bay. We learned first-hand last winter how much they just adore a hot greenhouse. The new heater also blows warm air around the space instead of radiating it, so we have continual air movement swirling around inside this year, which I also hope will help with any pests. The final great benefit of this small little worker is that it has an additional fan option too, so in summer we’ll be able to grow our herbs inside the greenhouse without the temperature getting too hot or the air too stagnant.

New Lights

My most favorite new enhancement to the greenhouse came this fall when we added bulb lights to the interior roofline. The lights make it so much easier to work at night, especially in the winter when it can get dark as early as 3:30pm if we have an especially cloudy or rainy weather day.

These bulb lights are a tad too big for the space, so they’ll be swapped out for something a bit more petite this spring, but we had these already on hand and wanted to make sure we liked the light idea before we committed to several sets. At night it looks especially festive. Once all the landscaping is in place around the greenhouse, it will provide a nice light source for outdoor dining during the warm weather days. By then we’ll be at least five months into the fragrant year and the garden will hopefully be on its way to becoming a perfumed paradise. Just dreaming about it now, I can see and smell the summer already.

If you’d like to catch up on the trials and tribulations of our first year of greenhouse gardening start at entry #1 here. Otherwise, it’s on to 2024 and all the delightful aromas that await each new season.

Cheers to ever-evolving garden adventures, to a scent-sational year ahead and to Helen and Leonie for inspiring this new set of diary entries centered around the life and times of one mighty but mini New England greenhouse.

A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Chapter 4 – One Last Journey

Published on January 23, 2024March 26, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen6 Comments

{Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost over a decade ago and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.}

This part of the lost item story is about numbers. Not numbers relating to complex math or phones or registry digits, but numbers that have to do with time and distance. So far, with the unfolding of each chapter of this Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts, we have learned bits and pieces about the lost item and how it came to wind up in the hands of the Vintage Kitchen. We learned how it arrived, who sent it and what part of history it involves. But we haven’t yet discussed the numbers, and they are quite important to the overall timeline of this intriguing item. So let’s look…

104 – that’s the age, in years, of the lost item
6,544 is the number of miles the item has traveled
7 is the number of states that the item has spent time in
3 is the number of major life-altering world events that could have completely destroyed the item and any link to its history over the past 100 years (those being the Great Depression, World War II and the Covid pandemic)
25 – that’s the number of people that are all connected to the item
29 is the number of months it took for the Vintage Kitchen to arrange to get the item to the place where it belongs

Transportation to its final destination was another set of numbers. That involved 3 cars, 1 plane, 1 bus and 1 boat. In its original cardboard mailer of medium thickness tucked inside a cloth shoulder bag, the item traveled in seat 21A on the plane and Lane 1 on the boat. This last round of Vintage Kitchen transporting from here to there required 5 different types of travel tickets, 1 Airbnb, 3 highway tolls, 2 parking garages, 1 security checkpoint and 1 wild landscape. But the most important set of numbers in this whole post are 2008 when it was lost and 2024 when it finally made its way home.

On 01-02-24, after 29 months spent in the hands of the Vintage Kitchen and 13 years spent in the care of kind-hearted Angela, the item embarked on its final journey via car, plane, bus and boat. Four days later it found the place where it belonged. It finally found its home.

Which city was the item headed to? For all you armchair detectives out there, our final destination is included in the Departure board.

Time is a weird and wonky master. It controls, records, rewards everything in our lives. Whether it’s minute with the tick, tick, ticking of seconds slowly passing by or an expansive stretch of milestones that cast long shadows over the course of a lifetime, time is always there to mark the moment. In this case of the lost item, timing, like the cliche suggests, is everything. It’s numbers on a clock, numbers on a calendar and numbers in a family. Without time, this story wouldn’t have been as meaningful. Without a significant sets of numbers all related to time and to fate, this situation from history wouldn’t have been remarkable. It’s the numbers, the time, the distance traveled that make this story of the item lost and finally found, notable.

This is your last chance to guess what the mystery item might be. Feel free to speculate in the comments section below or send us a private message with your ideas. Join us next time for Chapter 5, where we reveal the mystery item and connect all the dots that complete this story from start to finish. We cannot wait to share the ending with you. Stay tuned.

Update: Chapter 5 is now available. Continue reading here.

First glimpse of the final destination leading towards home.

A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Our 2021 Blog Series Is Finally Back with New Chapters

Published on January 13, 2024 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

It’s been two years and five months since this story began unfolding on the blog. Back then, the blog series with the impossibly long title – A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts detailed, in installments, the story of a mysterious package that was sent by a random stranger to the Vintage Kitchen in the summer of 2021.

Inside the package was a valuable 100-year-old item that had been found in a Southern city suburb by the random stranger in 2008. The item was connected to the Vintage Kitchen but did not belong to the Vintage Kitchen.

In 2021, the story had been rolling out at a nice clip. There was one blog post a month – one chapter a month – dropping hints and clues as to what the package’s contents could be and how it came to be connected to the Vintage Kitchen. In addition to the hints, Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three also included historical information surrounding the lost item’s importance.

Chapter 4 was next on the horizon with details of how the lost item would be transported to its final destination. Then the lingering pandemic stalled the publication of that post. Our move to New England prolonged it even further. But now the timing has lined back up again and we are back on track to finish this story and reveal the contents of the package in Chapters 4 & 5 coming to the blog this month. These last two chapters will officially wrap up the whole remarkable story of how a lost 100-year-old item finally found its way home after traveling through 13 years, four states and one century.

I realize that if you are a new reader to the blog this information is absolutely confusing. And perhaps, if you are a regular reader you might need a recap to remember what exactly this story was all about in the first place. Two and half years is a long time to keep a good mystery going so I’m including links to the first three blog posts below so that everyone can catch up before we continue on to Chapter 4, which I promise is coming in a few days (not years).

So here we are… links to each. Click on the photos or the highlighted chapter title links below and they will take you to the original posts laid out chapter by chapter.

Chapter One, titled It Arrives highlights the arrival of the mystery package and introduces some key information about the contents of the package.

Chapter Two, Meet Angela introduces the random stranger who sent the package to the Vintage Kitchen. It also highlights her research journey of how she wound up connecting the item to the Vintage Kitchen.

Chapter Three, The Time Period, highlights the era that surrounds the package’s contents – the 1920s and features several hidden clues as to what the mystery item might be.

Coming up next, it’s Chapter Four – One Last Journey – where transportation of the mystery item will be discussed as the item embarks on its final adventure to the place where it belongs.

While the story continues to unfold, there is still time to take a guess as to what the mystery item might be. Feel free to post your speculations in the comments section below. I can’t wait to share the rest of the story with you, so stay tuned for Chapter Four coming soon!

Reading While Eating: Seven Favorite Books Discovered in 2023

Published on December 31, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

Just in time, before we say goodbye to 2023, I didn’t want the year to leave without posting the annual recommended book list that has become a favorite here on the blog. This year’s selections center around nature, literary figures, artists, the art of collecting, and the curation of home in all the ways that make it personal and unique.

As is the way every year, these books were randomly discovered while doing research for other projects. They popped up while uncovering origin stories for shop heirlooms, researching story snippets for the blog, or understanding context surrounding a vintage recipe.

Serendipitous in their arrival on the bookshelf, yet ironically all connected via some common themes, these books were new to me this year but not newly published this year. The oldest one in this batch hails from 1979 and the newest one debuted just last year in 2022. All deal with historical subjects in one way or the other, but each one brings a very unique and fresh perspective to its subject matter. They take us on adventures from the wild beaches of coastal Massachusetts to an out-of-the-way antique shop in Mexico. We are introduced to a famous performer’s real-life home in California and a fictional version of a real-life literary figure’s farm in Georgia. There feature one Ernest, two Barbaras and three oranges. There’s eccentricity and domesticity, color and craft. But above all there is captivating storytelling right from the first page. Let’s look…

Six Walks by Ben Shattuck (2022)

What is it like to walk in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau? Do you see the same trees, smell the same air, touch the same ground, feel the same breeze? Henry lived and wrote and walked around the woods in Massachusetts over one hundred years ago and the impact it made on his life made his life. During the pandemic, trying to process a breakup and a general malaise that hovered over his thoughts like unsettled storm clouds, Ben Shattuck rediscovered Henry’s journals. Henry’s words so inspired Ben that he set out to see the world through “someone else’s eyes for a change,” hoping that he might gain some new perspective to help him past his grey days.

Following six of the same walks that Thoreau once took in the early to mid-1800s, Ben was searching for a new perspective, and a new understanding on life, love, and his place in it. For Henry, the walks were about looking at nature, about describing his surroundings, and about drawing comparisons between the natural world, human evolution and the emotional and spiritual impact on both. For Ben, walking was a form of therapy to help him move past some darker days, all the while submerging himself in the comfort of a favorite writer’s words and viewpoint. What results is this incredibly gorgeous book about nature writing, about escapism, about processing emotional trauma, and about seeing the real beauty that surrounds us every day.

On the walks, Ben meets an interesting array of characters. He goes in search of his ancestral homeplace, canoes down rivers that feel wild and untamed, and walks down long stretches of the beach until his feet are bloody and blistered. Funny, tender, thought-provoking and beautifully written, Ben’s perspective and lovely turns of phrase are just as illuminating as Henry’s. Part travel memoir, part therapy session, part sketchbook, Six Walks is one of the most beautifully written books about journeying that I’ve read in a really long time.

Finding Frida Kahlo – Barbara Levine (2009)

Written in both English and Spanish, this book is a fascinating portrait on the act of collecting and the art of curating. Finding Frida Kahlo is the true story of discovering a set of trunks belonging to Frida Kahlo in a Mexican antique shop. The woman who discovered these historical heirlooms was Barbara Levine, a former exhibitions director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who had recently moved to Mexico and was trying to assimilate into the culture. A trip with a few friends to an out-of-the-way antique shop led to the discovery of several trunks belonging to Frida Kahlo each filled with all sorts of her treasures – clothing, paintings, recipes, letters and personal heirlooms.

Image of the trunks from Finding Frida Kaho by Barbera Levine.

This discovery started a storytelling chain that is movie-like in scope and plot, unfolding all the unusual circumstances that led to the ultimate understanding of how trunks from one of the world’s most revered, most studied, and most collected artists could possibly have wound up quietly sitting on the floor of an antique shop practically unnoticed. Throughout the story, there is Barbara’s commentary on the processing of the collection, interviews with the antique shop owners, the detailed history of communication with the collector who held the suitcases originally, and consultations with the Fridos (the last remaining group of artists and writers who personally knew Frida Kahlo). I won’t share any more of those details here so as not to spoil the pacing of the story, but only to say you’ll be engaged right from Barbara’s first sentence… “I have long been a collector.”

Non-spoilers aside, Barbara tackles her discovery with a museum curator’s mindset, methodically documenting and photographing each item in each trunk with an unbiased approach. Frida’s objects come to life on the page. And in turn, Frida herself comes to life. You can see her handwriting, her diary entries, her sketches. You can see her clothing, her scrapbooks, her trinkets. You can see the weathered wood of the trunks in exquisite detail. There’s fabric and masks and stuffed taxidermy. There are recipes for Chicken Fried with Garlic in Peanut Sauce and another one for Spicy Salsa (more to come on that front in 2024). There are graphic, grotesque medical drawings of bloody amputations and beautiful brightly-colored paintings of birds and flowers. All along, these heirlooms are accompanied by Frida’s handwriting and you come to understand how all these objects formed her heart and her art.

The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast – Monica Randall (1979)

Built by wealthy business tycoons as getaway “cottages’, trophy houses, entertainment venues, weekend retreats and flamboyant examples of architectural artistry, the opulent mansions that dotted the Gold Coast of Long Island reveal fascinating insights into American culture, wealth and folly.

Beautiful and haunting, The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast spotlight incredible stories about the architects, owners, domestic staff, and modern mid-century families who all spent time in these grand estates. A book of architectural history could easily become boring if you stick with just the well-known, well-documented facts but Monica’s meticulously researched biographies, interviews with local residents, and first-hand experiences growing up in the area have brought forth only the most interesting details of each property.

Told in brief snippets, there are romantic love stories, untimely deaths, bizarre occurrences, ghostly apparitions, lavish design details and tragic degradation. House after house exposes the highs and lows of the ultra-wealthy during the 19th and 20th centuries and all that they celebrated but also all that they destroyed. Some of these estates still stand today, carefully maintained as examples of grand domesticity but many featured in this book were torn down, broken down, burned down, or fell down due to neglect and the lack of capital to maintain them. Monica captures each one in the state that she finds it in the 1970s, focusing on what they once were and what they now have become.

A Good Hard Look – Ann Napolitano (2011)

A fiction novel based in the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia, A Good Hard Look centers around a fictional recounting of the real-life writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) . It opens with a wedding in town of a doted daughter of the community, Cookie, and her fiance, Melvin – a wealthy New Yorker who is not used to Southern culture or the tight-knit atmosphere of small-town life. Not unlike Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, we see this town, these characters and Flannery herself through Melvin’s eyes who fully wants to commit to his new wife and his new life, but finds the peculiarities and the general mood of the town unsettling.

Flannery O’Connor’s farm, Andalusia, where she wrote her best-known books. Photo courtesy of exploregeorgia.org

The plot twists and turns, so I won’t say more so as not to spoil the story, but one of the things I loved most was all the detail about Flannery’s peacocks. As central characters in the book, you learn so much about these big, beautiful, boisterous, unruly birds who played not only a big part in the story but a big part in Flannery’s life too.

Flannery O’Connor at home with her beloved peacocks. Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Joe McTyre

This book reminded me a little bit of Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil mixed with the storytelling styles of William Faulkner, John Updike, and Anne Tyler. Once finished, it also prompted its own further research into Flannery’s life. Especially regarding the peacocks.

My Passion for Design – Barbra Streisand (2010)

All the buzz around Barbra Streisand this holiday season concerns her newly released memoir, My Name Is Barbra, but I’d like to shine a light on a book she published in 2010, My Passion for Design about building her dream house in California. It’s a memoir in and of itself, but it’s also a design book showing you (not telling you) how to build and fill a space with things you love. Barbra’s not following trends here. She’s following her heart and what results is a home packed with intimate stories of how it came to be. Included at each step are a bevy of sketches and before and after photos, many of which Barbra took and drew herself.

Barbra’s front entrance to the main house.

A lifelong antique collector, a lover of old houses, and a creative outside-of-the-box thinker, Barbra’s step-by-step building project is a captivating look at her creative journey towards fashioning the ideal homeplace. Even though she references films and performances along the way, you forget that Barbra is a world-famous singer, actor and director. Here in this book, she’s simply a woman on a mission to create a space she loves. Her vision for what she wants is mostly clear but she stumbles and changes directions sometimes too and occasionally has to compromise when the ideas in her head can’t feasibly match a comparable reality. It’s all very relatable.

Located right on the cliffs above the ocean, with views of the water from the backyard, Barbra’s compound is a conglomeration of buildings that includes two barns, a mill house, a 1950s ranch house, and a big main house. She thoughtfully designed and decorated each space from the ground up, but she’ll be the first to say that she’s the “idea” person only not the actual contractor, and never had any inclination to swing a hammer or erect a wall herself. Instead, she left all that up to her team of contractors and specialists – the talented individuals who had the tenacity to deal with her perfectionism, a trait she fully recognizes can be a bit difficult to work with.

What I really loved about this book was how Barbra talked about the idea of home and the creative touches that give a space meaning. She’s really thoughtful about every detail and wasn’t willing to compromise on something if she felt it wasn’t right. Intuitive and observant, she discusses her design inspirations (a certain painting, a detail from a movie set, the color of the sky at sunset) to the extent that you get the sense that she’s always on the lookout for objects, colors, textures, and patterns that stir a personal emotion. Even though her design style is not exactly my design style, it is refreshing to read an interior design book about someone who wholeheartedly embraces what she loves unapologetically. Instead of following trends or typically accepted interior design layouts, she follows her heart and her interests. What results is a home that is entirely her own.

Decorated endpapers feature a few of Barbra’s notes and sketches.

Even the exterior gets her thoughtful attention as she color coordinates all the flowers and landscaping to each building so that complimentary shades float freely in and out of doors. To accommodate changing moods and seasons, to find surprise and joy year by year, to delight the senses, to calm and also energize the spirit all while maintaining a sense of unique charm and character – those were what Barbra was reaching for in building her perfect place. By books end you can see that she accomplished all that, and maybe even a little bit more.

Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts From A Life Edited by Michael Katakis (2018)

I haven’t completely finished this book yet, but I knew it was going to be on the Best Of list just for the introduction by Michael Katakis alone. His perspective on memories and how they can be shaped or reshaped, defined or redefined, based on the truths and the fictions you want or are led to believe is compelling. He shares an incredible story that links the death of his mother to the assassination of John F Kennedy to the discovery that Ernest Hemingway lived in the same neighborhood as his relatives – all events that occurred within a few days of each other. Of course, all these big events affected him deeply, but it was Ernest’s writing that brought emotional comfort and mental escapism during that difficult time. A lifelong interest in the author and his work bloomed and would eventually make him the manager of the Ernest Hemingway Estate, and the editor of this book.

There’s so much that has already been written and recycled about Ernest Hemingway, that it’s difficult to separate the man from the myth. And you might suspect it would be difficult to present any sort of new factual information about him. But in Artifacts From A Life, there is an assortment of little-known or at least lesser-known details that paint Ernest in a new light.

Famous for writing short succinct sentences – his hallmark style – I always thought that was something Ernest developed over time, but actually it was a writing tip received during his first newspaper job. He was advised to stick with short sentences and to leave out the adjectives. Ernest adapted that way of writing and stuck with it for the rest of his career. Had the newspaper dictated that he write long, flowery sentences we might of had a completely different Ernest Hemingway experience altogether.

Packed with never-before-seen photographs, paper ephemera, letters and objects from his personal estate, there’s much to learn about Ernest and his strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. One of things of particular interest is Michael’s commentary as he manages Hemingway’s estate and discovers the wealth of information that it contains. He brings a unique perspective to the task and a wistful reverence for how things used to be that is so that is fresh and compelling.

“There are over eleven thousand photographs, bullfighting tickets and scraps of paper with lists of what books a struggling writer should read,” Michael writes. “There are airline, train and steamship tickets that are so lovely they seem a page from an illuminated manuscript and demonstrate how much beauty there once was in the artifacts of daily commercial exchanges. As I went through his things I realized how much tactile aesthetic has been sacrificed and replaced with a severe digital practicality.”

Opposite Michaels’ words on that topic are images of a beautiful 1930s receipt from a Paris bookstore with its stylish logo and sales clerk handwriting itemizing the books that Ernest had purchased that day. It’s that kind of thoughtful attention to history and to Ernest’s life that make this book a page-turner, and a truth, from the very beginning.

Picnic, Lightning – Billy Collins (1998)

Speaking of truth, I’ve never read Billy Collins’ work before, even though he’s considered to be America’s favorite poet and was the actual Poet Laureate of the United States in the early 2000s. But just this past fall, I discovered his 1998 book of his poems Picnic, Lightening and fell absolutely in love with the one on page 49. It’s titled This Much I Do Remember…

It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,

and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders

that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.

Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

“This Much I Do Remember” by Billy Collins. Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).

Oranges have been a real theme in the kitchen in these past three months. We made a vintage Parisian orange cocktail for the blog this month, shared a vintage recipe for orange sugarplum cookies in last week’s email newsletter and now there is this vintage poem about oranges sitting on a kitchen counter. It’s funny how things come together like that. The whole sensory experience that Billy sets up in this snippet of life with the camber of shoulders, the tone of voice lifting and falling in flight, the hasp of color, the painting within is just gorgeous. I love the way he likens the oranges fixed on the counter to the way the stars are said to be fixed in the universe. So beautiful.

Billy Collins (b. 1941) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003. Photo by Marcelo Noah.

So far Billy has published 18 books of poetry, starting with Pokerface in 1977 and just recently Musical Tables which came out in 2022. Picnic, Lightning was book number six debuting in the late 1990s. If you are new to Billy’s work, there is lots to choose from but I recommend starting with page 49 of Picnic, Lightening and working your way around his words from there.

Reading This Much I Do Remember was such a nice way to wrap up this past year – another one that was so full of tumultuous world events, political upheavals, and powerful weather occurrences. I love how in the poem, a natural peace was found in the kitchen. I love that time stopped. That the moment was recognized and appreciated before being committed to memory. I love that this poem is about a confluence of small unassuming details that turn out to make a big lasting impression. Cheers to more of that in 2024.

And cheers to Ben, Henry, Frida, Ann, Flannery, Ernest, Billy, Michael, Monica, Barbra S. and Barbara L. for sharing such wonderful insight into the passions that move the world forward through art and storytelling. Hope your new year overflows with equal joy. And I hope you find a book or two to fall in love with from this list. Thank you so much for being a part of our wonderful community. We can’t wait to share more favorites in 2024. Happy New Year!

Bar Hemingway’s Ritz 75: A Vintage Champagne Cocktail from Paris

Published on December 5, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen7 Comments

The history behind Bar Hemingway’s Ritz 75 runs long. If a cocktail could talk this one would tell many stories. Included in its 100-year lifespan are snippets about several greats – Ernest Hemingway, a New York nightclub, a French hotel and the best bartender in the world. And those are just tips of the ice cube. Even more stories lay below the gin line.

This cocktail’s core combination of ingredients – champagne, lemon juice, sugar and ice date back to the early 1900s when it was known as a French 75. Named after WWI field artillery, the drink was likened on first sip, to the quick jolt of a particular French canon’s blast. That immediate burst of flavor was the combination of champagne and lemon juice – the signature components that gave this cocktail a powerful little pucker.

The Stock Club in New York City circa 1944. Photographed here are filmmaker Orson Welles (bottom left corner smoking a cigar), talk-show host Morton Downey (bottom right corner), club owner Sherman Billingsley at center table, actress Margaret Sullivan (at table just above Orson Welles cigar) and Broadway producer, Leland Hayward to the right of Orson Welles’ shoulder.

In the 1920s, it took on a new sense of depth, flavor and revelry when gin was added to the sugary juice mix. That mixture was then tossed with ice in a cocktail shaker and finished in a glass topped off with champagne just before serving. Sparkly and citrusy, that was how the popular French 75 was prepared at New York City’s most famous nightspot, The Stork Club. From 1929-1960s, you could pretty much see every sort of movie star, politician, society maven, sports figure and writer all enjoying the cocktails provided by the club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger turned Manhattan business maverick. There, the French 75 made its fans.

The Hotel Ritz Paris on Place Vendome. Photo by Frederic de Villamil.

In Paris, in the late 20th century, the cocktail took on a new persona and a new name thanks to the elegant Ritz hotel and its beloved bartender, Colin Peter Field. Colin presided over Bar Hemingway, the snug drinking nook located inside the Ritz for thirty years up until this past summer 2023.

Bar Hemingway at Hotel Ritz, Paris. Photo by Pablo Sanchez.

Named after Ernest Hemingway, who frequented the hotel and drank many a martini there from the 1920s-1950s, when it was called Le Petite Bar, Bar Hemingway is filled with memorabilia featuring the writer’s life and literary works, many of which were curated by Colin himself. Model Kate Moss even added some vintage typewriters to the decor to compliment the aesthetic.

Under Colin’s hand, Bar Hemingway became a popular spot in the hotel and also the city, frequented by Hemingway lovers who wanted to walk in the footsteps of the literary giant. Ultimately though it was Colin who really stole the show each night. With his attentive presence, discreet mannerisms, head for literature and eye for art, Colin mixed up passion, dynamic conversation, and elegant drinks at Bar Hemingway night after night for three decades. He was so successful at his job, so devoted to his trade, that he was deemed the Best Bartender in the World by several leading travel magazines and won numerous awards throughout France for his bartending skills.

In 2001, Colin wrote a cocktail book containing recipes that he served at the bar along with interesting stories that surrounded them. Delightfully illustrated by Japanese artist, Yoko Ueta, this book is both a primer on how to be a thoughtful, intuitive mixer of drinks and a historical story guide detailing the origin stories of many classic cocktails.

Colin Peter Field as illustrated by Yoko Ueta.

Included in the book is Colin’s version of the French 75. It features freshly squeezed mandarin orange juice in addition to the already called for lemon juice, sugar, gin and champagne. The mandarin brightens the color of the cocktail from a hazy lemon yellow to a pale orange, similar to the flickering flame of candlelight. A garnish of both lime and mandarin rind at the edge of the glass adds a little extra flair. Renamed, this version is now known as the Ritz 75.

With a taste similar to Orangina, Ritz 75 is a refreshingly crisp and clean cocktail. The champagne adds an extra bit of sparkle and a festive air to the season. Without being syrupy sweet, and given its light citrus notes, it’s lovely as an aperitif for cocktail parties or for pre-dinner welcome drinks. It is also an excellent partner to hors d’oeuvres that lean towards the rich and buttery side of the palate like cheese trays, charcuterie boards and anything tucked inside a puff pastry. Just like its cousin, the Mimosa, the Ritz 75 is easily adaptable to all sorts of occasions beyond the holiday season too. It could be served at brunch, or perhaps your next book club meeting when Hemingway is on the list, or when the weather turns warm, it easily transitions out of doors for picnics and garden parties.

I don’t think Colin would mind what time of year you served the Ritz 75, just as long as it accompanied a good story and a pleasant environment. Ernest would definitely second the story part. Together, the two I’m sure would be happy to clink glasses and call it a festive night, so we’ll do the same. Cheers to the holiday season and to Colin and to Ernest whose books continue to capture our attention. Here’s to hoping your December is full of flavor, merriment, and a little something sparkly.

Ritz 75

From Cocktails of the Ritz Paris by Colin Peter Field circa 2001. Serves two.

1 1/2 oz lemon juice

1 1/2 oz mandarin juice, freshly squeezed

1 teaspoon of sugar

1 1/2 oz gin

Champagne to finish

Mandarin and lime rinds to garnish

Mix the lemon juice, mandarin juice, and sugar in a cocktail shaker. Fill with ice, and then add the gin. Shake a few times. Pour the mixture evenly into two glasses, then fill the rest of the glass with champagne. Garnish with slices of lime and mandarin. Add a cherry (optional) for additional color.

Cheers!

Holiday Classics: A Vintage Cranberry Relish Recipe from Historic Connecticut

Published on November 14, 2023November 16, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

Undoubtedly the most well-known food to come out of Mystic, Connecticut is pizza, thanks to the 1988 movie Mystic Pizza starring Julia Roberts…

The real-life pizza shop that inspired the film is still serving up hot pies every day in this beautiful, bustling, historic port city, but there’s a long-standing tradition of other delicious New England fare that has made Mystic, CT a go-to source for memorable cuisine too. The recipe featured here today might not be the star of a feature film but it definitely will be a star on your holiday table. Today’s post comes from The Mystic Seaport Cookbook, a collection of historic New England recipes first published in 1970 by Lilian Langseth-Christensen…

You might remember this cookbook from last Spring when we featured a hot rum toddy and a story about sailors and life on the high seas.

This guy was the star of our hot toddy post.

The recipe we are featuring here today isn’t quite as dramatic as that one, but it is equally delicious. Simply called Cranberry Relish, it’s an ideal alternative to canned cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and travels the rest of the holiday season with tantalizing appeal. Post-Turkey Day, this simple New England cranberry relish becomes a crimson-colored companion to all sorts of festive Christmas party hors d’oeuvres, holiday-themed sandwiches, and cozy winter snacks.

A 19th-century cranberry farm located in Mansfield CT. Image courtesy of the Mansfield Historical Museum and Library.

Back in the 19th century, Connecticut was home to a number of cranberry farms, but it isn’t known for its commercial cranberry bogs anymore. In New England, that’s left up to the neighboring state of Massachusetts now, where they harvest over two million pounds of cranberries per year. Some farms in the Bay State have been run by generations of families that stretch back over 150 years. Thanks to modern machinery, cranberry farming is an easier endeavor but back then it was considered one of the hardest crops to farm and was done entirely by hand with wooden scoops combed through the cranberry bushes. No one was spared the arduous task of collecting cranberries, not even kids.

Cranberry harvesters on Cape Cod circa 1909.

Cranberry Farm – Pemberton, NJ circa 1910. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

A wooden cranberry scoop, also sometimes referred to as a cranberry rake. Image courtesy of a 1940s-era American Cranberry Exchange recipe booklet.

In Connecticut, there is just one remaining cranberry farm in the state left, but cranberry relish has been a part of the New England diet and therefore, the Connecticut diet, since colonial days when indigenous tribes taught early settlers how to pound them into pastes and sauces.

Harvested during the autumn months of September and October, by the time they make an appearance on the Thanksgiving table in the form of relishes, jellies, jams, compotes, sauces, and innumerable baked goods, cranberries add bright color, dimension, and acidic flavor to a holiday meal mostly recognized by its earthy brown and beige shades.

A cranberry recipe cooking booklet courtesy of the American Cranberry Exchange, headquartered at 90 West Broadway, New York, NY. The A.C.E. was a cranberry cooperative that operated between 1907 and 1957 among several US states including Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and New Jersey.

Pick up any New England cookbook, and the author will have their own preferred method of making this holiday side dish, but there will always be some ingredients that everyone agrees on. Technically, what differentiates cranberry sauce from cranberry relish is the cooking process. Cranberry sauce generally tends to be cooked on the stovetop – boiled down with sugar to a sweetened consistency that is thin and syrupy or thick and gelatinous depending on the amount of cooking time. Relish, on the other hand, more often than not, is mixed together in a blender and served chunky and raw with the addition of just a bit of sugar and some other aromatics including spices and citrus. The recipe featured here today is a cross between both. It’s cooked on the stove and includes citrus, raisins, and nuts for a more chutney-like consistency. The chunky texture and quick cooking method, make this Mystic recipe easy and versatile – ideal for all sorts of applications long after the Thanksgiving meal has been enjoyed.

First, we will look at the cooking method and then we’ll dive into the number of different ways to serve this version of cranberry relish. You’ll notice at the end, that this recipe offers a canning suggestion for storage but we just made one big batch and stored it in the fridge where it lasted for over a week and a half.

Cranberry Relish

From the Mystic Seaport Cookbook circa 1970

Makes 6 pints

6 cups fresh cranberries

1 cup cold water

1 cup boiling water

1 1/2 cup raisins

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

2 large oranges

4 cups sugar

Grated rind of 1 lemon

Wash the cranberries and pick out any remaining debris (stems, leaves, etc). Boil them in a cup of cold water until the skins pop and the berries become soft.

Blend them into a puree using a hand-held immersion blender…

and then add the boiling water, raisins, walnuts, and sugar. Peel the oranges and dice the pulp. Scrap any white pith off the orange rinds, discard the pith, and dice the orange rinds. Add the rind to the mixture.

Next, stir in the grated lemon rind, and cool the relish.

Transfer relish to a bowl and serve or store in an airtight container in the fridge or pour into jars. If storing in jars, seal the jars with melted paraffin wax and shelve for a later date.

A lovely addition to the holiday table, this cranberry recipe contains the best of both worlds when it comes to sauce and relish. It’s syrupy but also chunky. It’s sweet but also tangy. The walnuts give it a satisfying dose of substance and protein. The citrus adds a burst of flavor that keeps the palate notes fresh and bright.

One of our favorite ways to serve Cranberry Relish is poured over a wedge of Brie cheese.

Naturally, it pairs well with turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy but we also love it when it is heated up and spread piping hot over Brie cheese and served alongside an assortment of crackers. Post-Thanksgiving, we like to spread this relish on bread just like mayonnaise for turkey sandwiches. Add it to the filling of turkey pot pie and the dish becomes more savory in an instant. Spread it on leftover Thanksgiving dinner rolls and serve it alongside eggs for breakfast or add it as a topper to oatmeal or yogurt. It’s also great on grilled burgers – beef, chicken, turkey or vegetarian. Basically, any place where you might like a little dollop of a sweet condiment, this one works wonders.

There’s no end to the zillion ways you can incorporate Thanksgiving leftovers into new and creative foods. That’s really the beauty of the holiday after all, isn’t it? All that cooking done days ahead of time allows a rest post-holiday with minimal meal-making effort required, except for quick reheats of the feast that keeps on giving. That leaves plenty of time to relax, read a book, enjoy your friends and family, play games, go for a walk, watch a movie. Perhaps after reading this post, Mystic Pizza will be on the viewing schedule. And maybe, depending on how adventurous you are in the kitchen, this cranberry relish might just inspire a new type of pizza topping too – Mystic style.

If you are looking for more vintage recipes to augment your Thanksgiving menu, we also recommend colonial-style Corn Pudding from the Williamsburg Cookbook and Homemade Citrus Cider from the 1989 Southern cookbook, Wild About Texas.

Hope you find this recipe just as delicious as we did. If you have any favorite cranberry sauce recipes, please feel free to include yours in the comments section. Cheers to the cranberries and all the cooking creativity they inspire.

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