Cassandra's Favorite Apple Pie

Apple pie has become part of the American consciousness as representative of all that is wholesome and good about our country; a reminder of comfort and innocence. In World War II, when American soldiers were asked by journalist why they were going to war the standard response was “for Mom and apple pie”. It has been said that the Apple Marketing Board of New York State used such slogans as "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" and "as American as apple pie!" and thus was successful in rehabilitating the apple as a popular comestible in the early twentieth century when prohibition outlawed the production of hard cider.

There are American apple pie recipes, both manuscript and printed, from as early as the eighteenth century. Yet, what we consider to be apple pie has been around in Europe since the Middle Ages. Medieval and Renaissance recipes for apple pies or tarts have shown up, in one form or another, in English, French, Italian, and German recipe collections that span centuries and which show a wide variety of ways to prepare apple pie.

English apple pie recipes go back to the time of Chaucer.  The recipe above from 1381 lists the ingredients as good apples, good spices, figs, raisins and pears.  The cofyn of the recipe is a casing of pastry.  Saffron is used for coloring the pie filling.  Cloves are a popular addition, tempering the sweetness in much the same way as cinnamon.  The absence of sugar in the recipe may indicate that, because refined sugar was a recent introduction from the Orient, the medieval English did not have as sweet a tooth as their descendants!

Cassandra's Favorite Apple Pie

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

For Pie Crust: Cassandra likes Oronoque Orchards (by Mrs. Smith’s) frozen pie crusts

For Filling: (Makes one pie)
3 lbs apples, such as Gala, Cortland, Granny Smith or McIntosh, peeled cored and cut into half-inch wedges.
1 cup sugar
½ cup honey, preferably a local, more flavorful raw honey
½ cup cornstarch
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp ground cinnamon
Zest and juice of one lemon

 

Thaw the frozen pie shells.
In a large saucepan, sift together the sugar and cornstarch, then toss with apples, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, lemon juice and zest. Let stand for 20 minutes.
Bring fruit mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly until the mixture has thickened slightly, making sure fruit does not stick to the bottom of saucepan. Remove from heat and cool.
Fill thawed pie shell with the fruit filling and then lay the second dough circle over the filling, press very gently around the edges and flute together. With a paring knife or cookie cutter, puncture the top pie dough to form (a) steam vent(s). If desired, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
Bake for about 40 minutes or until the pie filling is starting to bubble out the vents and the top pie crust is golden brown. Remove to a cooling rack and allow to cool for 1-2 hours before serving.

Autumn

Winter is an etching,

Spring a watercolor,

Summer an oil painting,

And autumn a mosaic of them all. 

Stanley Horowitz 

Decorative publishers' editions of the early 20th century with an autumn theme from Cassandra's collection:

A Lovely Time, Not Very Long Ago...Thank You, Eloise Wilkin!

During her 50 year career spanning the decades of the 1930s through the 1980s, Eloise Wilkin illustrated over 110 books for children.  Her illustrations evoke an idyllic rural world not unlike that which she knew while raising her family of four children in upstate New York.  Famous for her instantly recognizable style: sweet, cherubic, chubby-faced children; detailed early American and Victorian style architecture and furnishings; and the verdant, daisy-strewn hills of upstate New York, Eloise illustrated children’s early reading books; paper dolls; puzzles; entries in the Childcraft series; 20 books authored by her sister, Esther; as well as her 47 popular “Little Golden Books” titles.  Her most beloved titles include We Help Daddy, We Help Mommy, Baby Dear, So Big!, Prayers for Children, Busy Timmy, and My Little Golden Book About God.

In addition to free lance drawing and book illustration, in the early 1960s Eloise successfully designed and marketed, via the Vogue Doll Company, a new-born infant doll about which the popular Little Golden Book, Baby Dear, was later written. Eloise's daughter, Deborah and grandson, David served as the models for the mother and baby in the book. The realistic style of the Baby Dear doll revolutionized the doll industry at the time, encouraging more realistic baby dolls. Reportedly, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev returned home with several of the dolls after a trip to F.A.O. Schwartz in New York City.

Born in Rochester, New York in 1904, Eloise Burns, was fortunate to have had a mother who encouraged her imaginative children to enjoy their creative gifts, allowing them to draw all over one wall in their house just before redecorating. Her father was a newspaperman and her mother had studied piano at a conservatory and often played classical music, which Eloise grew to love. Eloise, her sister Esther (only fifteen months older), a brother Robert, and two other siblings grew up in New York City on 109th Street near Central Park. As children, Eloise and Esther shared a bedroom and spent hours creating doll houses from orange crates, dolls out of newspapers, and sewing doll clothes. Eloise and Esther, remained especially close, and eventually married brothers, Sydney and George Wilkin. At age 11, Eloise won a drawing contest for children, sponsored by the Wanamaker department stores, with a picture of a pilgrim returning home.

While studying art at Mechanics Institute (now Rochester Institute of Technology), Eloise Burns met Joan Esley, best known as an illustrator of several books for adolescents. They formed a lifelong friendship that included collaboration on a children’s book entitled, The Visit. After graduating from The Rochester Institute of Technology, Eloise and Joan began doing free lance work in Rochester (i.e., Eloise painting stations of the cross for the Sacred Heart Academy Church and illustrations for the Rochester Box Company) and ultimately moved together to New York City, where they hoped to have a better chance at careers in illustration. Eloise’s first book was The Shining Hour for the Century Co. Other publishers for  which she illustrated were Ginn, Scribner, Little Brown, Rand McNally, Random House and MacMillian. Many early illustrations were for school books, i.e., The First Grade Book for Ginn. Early in her career Eloise illustrated paper dolls for Samuel Gabriel & Sons, Playtime House and Jaymar. She illustrated for four years before marrying Sidney Wilkin in 1935, thus, her early works are signed Eloise Burns.

The Wilkins family settled in a fieldstone farmhouse with eight fireplaces in the country near Canandaigua in upstate New York, and Eloise slowed her career for several years while raising her four children, Ann, Sidney, Jr., Deborah and Jeremy. In 1943, she was offered a contract with Simon & Schuster and worked almost exclusively for Little Golden Books, illustrating the 47 little golden books, calendars, shape books, big golden books, and sturdy golden books until 1961; then, only occasionally illustrating for them up until the mid-eighties. Eloise used her neighborhood, her home, her children, her husband, her grandchildren, and their friends and neighbors as models for her illustrations. Many little golden book pages became puzzles which were produced by Simon & Schuster and later Golden Press. Earlier puzzles illustrated by Wilkin have been found produced by Playtime House and Leo Hart Co. Her illustrations are also found on record sleeves of many little golden records (occasionally on the record label itself) and on china plates, ads, Hallmark cards and in Child's Life, Story Parade and Golden Magazines. Currently, original editions of Eloise Wilkin illustrated books in very good condition can command prices of up to several hundred dollars.

It is said that Eloise was very modest about her talents and was a woman who stood up for her beliefs, whether it was refusing to paint pants on a mother in one of her children’s books, marching with Martin Luther King, marching with the Berrigans in Washington early in the Vietnam War, teaching art to inner city children, or assisting a University of Rochester student in the burning of his draft card in Central Park.

In October of 1987, Eloise died of cancer, at the age of 84 in Brighton, New York. At the time of her death, she was working on a new doll and was still illustrating.

In the recently published, A Little Golden Book Collection Eloise Wilkin Stories (featuring nine of her most treasured stories: "Busy Timmy, "Guess Who Lives Here", "Wonders of Nature", "Selections from A Child’s Garden of Verses", "We Help Mommy", "Baby Listens," "Baby Dear," and "Baby Looks"), an afterword by James Werner Watson aptly describes Eloise Wilkin’s legacy:

"A warm and creative homemaker, Eloise shared with the world glimpses of her big, busy, welcoming household, its rooms papered with gentle patterns, its drop-leaf tables and rocking chairs aglow with hand-rubbed sheen, its four-poster beds covered by hand-stitched quilts. A devoutly religious person, she shared ever so gently her values, her sense of the beauty of order and love, of implicit self-discipline, and of regard for others . . . she has left us, only slightly idealized, rich reminders of a lovely time not very long ago."

To listen to a three-part interview with one of Eloise Wilkin’s daughters, Deborah Wilkin Springett, (author of the Eloise Wilkin’s Book of Poems, her mother’s last illustrated book, published in 1988) and to order her biography about her mother, The Golden Years of Eloise Wilkin, go to: http://www.triviumpursuit.com/blog/2007/02/21/podcast-2-interview-with-eloise-wilkins-daughter-part-one/

Autumn at Our Farm

(All photos taken last week at our Schoharie County, New York farm)

                    An Antique Postcard from my Collection

A haze on the far horizon...

The infinite, tender sky...

The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields...

And the wild geese sailing by...

And all over the upland and lowland, the charm of the goldenrod...

Some of us call it Autumn, and others call it God.



Frances Theodora Parsons (a.k.a., Mrs. William Starr Dana)

During the winter…For all practical purposes nature is at a standstill. . . there is a wonderful joy in leaving behind the noisy city streets and starting out along the white road that leads across the hills. With each breath of the sharp, reviving air one seems to inhale new life. A peace as evident as the sunshine on the fields takes possession of one's inner being. The trivial cares which fretted like a swarm of mosquitoes are driven away by the first sweep of wind that comes straight from the mountains. . . The intense silence that broods over the snow-bound land is a conscious blessing. The deep blue of the sky and the purple shadows cast by the trees and plants are a feast to the eye. The crunch of the snow-rind beneath our feet and the varied hum of the telegraph wires overhead are music to our ears.


An amateur botanist and author during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Frances Theodora Smith Dana Parsons (1861 - 1952) wrote four notable botanical books, which I have discovered due to their lovely decorative publishers edition covers, designed by the famed cover illustrator of that time period, Margaret Armstrong:

How to Know the Wild Flowers: A Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of our Common Wild Flowers (1893). Author: Mrs. William Starr Dana. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Illustrations by Marion Satterlee. This, her most famous work, which has been referred to as the “first field guide to North American wildflowers,” went through several editions in her lifetime and has remained in print into the 21st century. The original beginnings of the conservation movement took place in the 1890s, and this book was the first of many such books published between 1890 and the early years of the 20th century. Arranged by flower colors, the book not only describes a plant and gives botanical data but also tells where to find it. It was something of a sensation in its day, the first printing selling out in five days; and garnered favorable responses from Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling, among others.

According To Season [Cassandra’s favorite!] (1894), Author: Mrs. William Starr Dana. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. This book features a collection of the author’s articles for the New York Tribune. As stated by the author in her preface: “In that the aim of this little volume is the stimulation of an observant love of nature, and especially the increase of knowledge about our plants, it is similar to ‘How to Know the Wildflowers.’ But in each book this has been attempted in so different a mood and manner that I feel confident that neither encroaches upon the province of the other...”

Plants and their Children (1896), Author: Mrs. William Starr Dana, New York: American Book Company. Illustrations by Alice Josephine Smith. Published by a popular schoolbook publisher of this era, this sweet little volume authored for children was named one of the 50 best children’s books of its time and was suggested for reading to young children in the classroom.

How to Know the Ferns (1899). Author: Frances Theodora Parsons. Originally illustrated by Marion Satterlee and Alice Josephine Smith. Toronto: The Publisher's Syndicate Limited. A newly enlarged edition was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1903 with 32 color plates illustrated by Elsie Louis Shaw. A total of seven printings of this book were by New York: Charles Scribner's Sons between 1900 and 1925; then years later in the late 1900s there were at least two printings by New York: Dover Book; and finally, one printing in 2005 by Kessinger Publishing.

Born in 1861 in New York City to N. Denton Smith, a tea merchant, and Harriet Shelton Smith and educated at Miss Comstock’s School, Frances Theodora, or “Fanny,” developed her lifelong love of of nature and especially of wildflowers during summers spent at her maternal grandparents' home located between the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains near Newburgh, New York. Frances married, William Starr Dana, a Commander in the U.S. Navy and sixteen years her senior, in 1884 at the age of 23. Shortly thereafter she lost her first baby, and in 1890 her husband died in a flu epidemic in Paris. Observing the Victorian rules for widows, Frances wore black and restricted her social contacts for some years afterward, until her friend Marion Satterlee lured her into taking walks in the countryside and resuming her interest in wildflowers. It has been said that these strolls inspired her first and most popular book, How to Know the Wildflowers (1893). As was the custom for female authors of her day, she first used her husband’s name as her author’s name, “Mrs. William Starr Dana,” for her first three books published in 1893, 1894 and 1896.

Frances "in the field" - from the frontispiece of How to Know the Ferns

In 1896, Frances married Professor James Russell Parsons, Jr., an author in the field of education, treasurer of the University of the State of New York at Albany, a politician in New York State and later a diplomat – Counsel General at Mexico City under President Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Frances’ family since childhood. During the early years of their marriage in Albany, New York, James had financial problems - the reason Frances wrote How to Know the Ferns, as a companion volume to her successful wildflower guide. The cover of How to Know the Ferns (published in 1899) records her name as “Frances Theodora Parsons, Author of How to Know the Wildflowers.” Before James Parson’s tragic and untimely death in Mexico City in 1905 via a collision of a trolley car with his carriage, the couple had a son, James Russell Parsons III, in 1897, and a daughter, Dorothea, who died in 1902 at the age of 2 ½ .

After being widowed this second time, Frances published a poem in Scribner’s Magazine , (“When Laughter is Sadder than Tears,” January, 1911, Vol. XLIX, p. 71); but did not write any other books until 1951, a year before her death in Katonah, New York, at the age of 90, when she privately published an autobiography, Perchance Some Day (1952).

After James’ death, Frances and her son, Russell, moved from Albany back to New York City; and both were often cited in the New York Times’ society columns alongside the Astors, the Tiffanys, etc.  During the remainder of her lifetime Frances did not pursue any other botanical activities. She was an advocate of women’s suffrage and an active supporter of the Republican and Progressive Parties (serving as first vice-president of the New York County Republican Committee and as a member of the Republican Women’s State Executive Committee, and managing a successful campaign for New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, when he ran for President of the Board of Aldermen). She participated in activities supporting wounded World War I veterans, the New York City public schools, and the protection of Central Park and traveled widely in Europe. Interestingly, her obituary on June 11, 1952, focuses on her civic accomplishments and barely mentions her four famous botanical books.

In her 1951 autobiography, Frances does not dwell on her personal life, but portrays a way of life and tells inside stories of political intrigue. As one brief online Parsons biography states, “As an intimate of the Roosevelt family, she was well placed to talk about the jockeying for position that went on in state Republican circles. Occasionally, she comments on the position of women or their interests, often seeming surprised at the lack of masculine support for women's rights. Parsons was not a serious botanist or naturalist, but her organizing abilities, thoroughness, and common sense made her books successful. Politics and nature make an interesting combination in her writings.”  I would certainly agree…

To Commemorate the First Day of School...

Hornbooks

Do you know that I've been told
When Grandmama was four years old
She learnt to say her A.B.C.
And went to school like you and me...
But in poor grannie's book
Was only one page--look!
And in case this should be torn
It was covered up with horn
And nailed upon a wooden back
With bits of brass and many a tack.
So remember when you look
At the pictures in your book
That poor Grannie long ago
Had but a HORNBOOK as you know
But learnt to read to write to rhyme
And so will you my dears in time.
Georgie Gaskin, HORNBOOK JINGLES, 1896-7


Hornbooks

Hornbooks were most often made of oak, the letters were covered with transparent horn and the whole fastened down with brass strips and tacks. Sometimes leather was used to cover the wood or hold down the letters. Wealthy children had hornbooks made of ivory or silver. Schools used hornbooks made of brass or lead. The text consisted of the alphabet or the alphabet and numbers, or all of the above with the Lord's Prayer.

The hornbook originated in England around 1450 and is mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, act 5, scene 1, where the ba, the a, e, i, o, u, and the horn, are alluded to by Moth:

ARMADO. [To HOLOFERNES] Monsieur, are you not lett'red?
MOTH. Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
HOLOFERNES. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.
MOTH. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
HOLOFERNES. Quis, quis, thou consonant?
MOTH. The third of the five vowels, if You repeat them; or the fifth, if I.
HOLOFERNES. I will repeat them: a, e, I-
MOTH. The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, U.

It is also described by Ben Jonson in his play, Volpone, act 4, scene 2:

CORVINO: ... And yet I hope that I may say, these eyes
Have seen her glued unto that piece of cedar,
That fine well-timber'd gallant; and that here
The letters may be read, through the horn,
That make the story perfect.

Use of the hornbook was especially prevalent in the New England colonies.



A picture of a "chapman," who sold hornbooks and chapbooks. (From a drawing first published in Rome in 1646.)