Category: Reenacting

Wash on Monday

On By kittycalashIn History, Laundry, personal, Reenacting
shifts and petticoats on a line
Living history laundry

We spent Labor Day laboring at home: even the Young Mr spent the day working on a five page essay (due Wednesday) for history class. I spent the day tidying the house and washing clothes from all centuries.

Of our historic clothes, I don’t often wash more than body linen (shifts, shirts, stockings) but the petticoats had not been washed in some time; in the end, I washed the tow and blue striped one, but only aired the Virginia cloth and madder linen. Since I may not wear these again this year, washing and airing seemed warranted.

It’s incredibly easy to wash in this century, with the luxuries of indoor plumbing, a hot water heater and a washing machine. At Walloomsac, though I didn’t do any laundry, we were always fetching water, and I think of how much water we use, and how easily.

chintz and checked clothes on a clothesline
Red, white and blue

While I stitched a dress (new, though the mending pile is growing), I listened to biography of the Buddha, and thought about mindfulness and living history.

What is there to learn from sewing a gown, or hanging my wash on the line? How much does it matter that sunlight makes my shifts brighter, or that the dress in my lap is not a exact replica of an extant garment, but rather one made using period techniques, a close analog of a period fabric, and is cut to period style?

So little remains of the vast middle and smaller lower classes that it would be stifling to limit oneself only to exact replicas. And in any case, we can never recreate the mindset or worldview of the people of the past. We can only mimic their processes, read their words, and study the things they have left behind in our best attempts to understand them.

On Wanting to Quit the Hobby

On By kittycalashIn Fail, Living History, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting8 Comments

Sometimes I want to quit this hobby.

It’s usually for selfish, petty reasons: for all I swear that I didn’t see the trash compactors and cars in Newport, spinning wheels, cast iron, and candelabra in dining flies made me nuts at Bennington. Why the difference? In Newport, the modern things were all backdrop and unchangeable. At Bennington, reenactors had choices.

Why would someone else’s cast-iron kitchen make me want to pack up my sticks and go home? Maybe because I’ve been very tired this summer. But more honestly, I have a streak of self-righteous grade-grubber: “I work hard at this, why can’t you?” was surely my internal whine as I surveyed the mess area at Bennington.

My emotional immaturity aside, I think that same “I get this, why can’t you?” is felt by a lot of reenactors/interpreters when they stand in their well-researched, hand-sewn, and agonized-over clothes in a Spartan camp watching the public interact with sofa-print-gown- or baggy-breeches-wearing cooks bent over cast iron in camps littered with slat-back chairs, folding tables, and candlesticks.

We feel unappreciated. We feel like no one recognizes our hard work. We are not getting the grade we deserve.

We need to get over it.

Don’t abandon the authenticity: abandon the attitude. Abandon the eye-rolling, the snubbing, the sneers, and the turning away.

Comparison is the enemy of contentment. Even when you think you’re better.

Stop playing the “I’m more authentic than you” game. It sucks. It makes people want to quit this hobby. It makes people want to skip events.

You want to have events where only people who meet your personal authenticity standards can play? Knock yourself out. Keep it private. In privacy, be as catty as you like with people who enjoy it, but keep it in the real world and not online. Online, it comes off as passive-aggressive cowardice.

Right?
Right?

Not everyone wants to play the same game. But no matter what the game is, it’s never fun to be the butt of meanness, and it’s not really fun to be mean—plus, it’s bad for your health, bad for the hobby, bad for the people around you.

We’re visual creatures: we can over-focus on what we see. We focus on the clothing being worn instead of the person inside those clothes. But really, it is the person who is important.

So maybe we should lighten up a little.
So maybe we should lighten up a little.

Individual choices don’t always affect a group. When choices do affect a group—cars in camp past stated removal times, weapons and fire safety violations—then I think anyone can and should speak up. But violations of published and easily accessible standards should be pointed out to event organizers, and not handled at the individual level. When there are no published and readily accessible shared standards, there’s nothing to enforce. So consider stepping down from the fashion police and enjoying yourself instead. I’ve been to very few events without redeeming factors.

Lighten up!

All that iron at Bennington? Forgotten when I focused on what I was doing: cooking something new in camp, and forgotten even more when I shared the pudding and compote with my friends.

That’s why I don’t quit this hobby: it allows me to share amazing experiences with my friends, I learn new things all the time, and I get far outside my petty worries.

Boil and Not Too Much Trouble

On By kittycalashIn Events, Food, Living History, Reenacting3 Comments

Camp cooking can get old. Stew, sigh. Bread, sigh. Cheese, sigh. Apples, sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: all of the above are delicious today. Historically, New England troops are all about cheese and cider, and have much to say about the quality of beef, but menu can be repetitive and lacking in challenge.

Ever since I had boiled flour pudding at Coggeshall Farm, I’ve wanted to make it since I so much enjoyed the texture.

When I found it mentioned by Enos Hitchcock, I was particularly excited.

1777 May 24
Dined upon flowr puding & Venison Steak.

Flowr puding? I love that guy! But there it is, documented, even if eaten by the officers and not the private soldiers. It’s common enough that I think it likely almost everyone knew how to make it. The trick would have been getting hold of eggs and milk, which is easy enough for me, if not for the soldiers of 1777. Fortunately, as we drove down Cottrell Road headed for home, a flock of Plymouth Rock chickens crossed the road in front of us: there were the eggs, at least in our time.

postcard of kittens eating christmas pudding
Not your chaplain’s pudding.

The method I had tried at home worked: I beat three eggs and four spoons of milk in my tall redware mug, and added the liquid slowly to the flour and salt mixture. The whole mixture went into a cloth bag, which I tied with a string and boiled in the smallest kettle, not want to risk any damage to the beef stew. I’ll test the works at home on my nearest kin and willing victims before I loose it upon a regiment and hungry guests.

Although the pudding was a strange shape, it cooked up quickly in about 45 minutes, had a firm texture and a satisfactory enough flavor. I would have liked it to rise a bit more, which is an argument either for beating the eggs with a fork in the confined cylinder of the cup, or risking the splash of the whisk in a bowl, or, finally, for a smaller whisk.

Still, not too bad for expanding the camp cooking repertoire of Things That Can be Boiled and Eaten.

When in Doubt, Bake

On By kittycalashIn Food, History, Living History, Reenacting3 Comments

There was a Very Bad Summer when much was awry at work, the flat we were living in was for sale, my father was moving far away, and the Howling Assistant was sick. In response, I baked.

Things are roiling in the world of late, both at work and in the wider world (I am from St. Louis, and cannot ignore the news from Ferguson), and so again, I turned to baking. Eggs, flour, sugar: what could be sweeter?

A friend tried Amelia Simmons‘ Diet bread a few years ago, with limited success, but the simplicity of the receipt has always appealed to me.

recipe for diet bread
Diet Bread

Once again, I risked early morning baking, but I think this has turned out OK. I had to leave for work before it was cool enough to really eat, but a corner was delicious! The intense amount of sugar– a full pound!– was intimidating, the rose water curious when tested, but combined with the cinnamon, seems to have a pleasant and slightly exotic flavour.*

The simplicity of the ingredients was encouraging, but I probably would not have jumped into this had I not found someone else had leaped before me.

Kathleen Gudmundsson on the Historical Cooking Project blog tackled diet bread in May. From her work, I took the tip to use only six eggs.

Following Gudmundsson thoughts at the end of her entry, I beat the egg yolks separately, intending to add the stiff-peaked whites at the end. Half way through adding the flour, the batter became extremely stiff and sticky, and nearly unmanageable, so I beat a whole seventh egg and added that, followed by a little flour and 1/4 of the beaten whites. I alternated flour and egg whites, finishing with egg whites, and found the mixture retained pliability and texture.

Like Gudmundsson, I also lined a glass pan with parchment paper, but my (electric, rental-quality) oven runs a little slow, so baked for 30 minutes at 400F.

diet cake made of sugar, flour and eggs
Diet Cake, from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons.

The results look like hers, and since she thought the cake was as good or better three days after she’d made it, my hopes for an interesting dessert remain intact.

The other, less distracting, project I’ve taken on this week is a set of bags for coffee and food stuffs.

handsewn linen bags in white and check
Linen bags for foodstuffs

After all, there are no ziplock bags or plastic tubs in 1777, and full complement of graduated tin canisters seems unlikely to plummet into my lap anytime soon. The two slender bags are for coffee: tied at the neck, they’ll hold enough for cold coffee and fit the slender tin coffee pot we have, sparing the larger cloths, wrangling grounds, and giving us clear, cold, caffeine. Another is for flour, one could be for oatmeal, another for sugar. In any case, things to eat are getting wrangled in a way that can remain visible in camp.

I know: a trifle mad, but the time I spend now makes living in public so much easier when there’s less to hide. And yes, before you ask: that will be a real fire.

*Fellow eaters, you’ve been warned.