rthstewart | The happiest time of the year? EDIT

Entry tags:

3 sentence ficathon,
aw,
food for thought,
holidays,
how does asim feel about ginger cookies?,
in progress,
real life,
sneak peek

The happiest time of the year? EDIT

EDIT: I forgot to add the real reason for my post! British super mystery writer PD James has written Pride and Prejudice fan fic. Death Comes to Pemberley

Actually, it isn't, in my experience. I am fine, humming along, though my desire for massive quantities of baking wars with my desire to not eat all the cookies.For those of you who find this time of year especially stressful, whether to exams or otherwise, I send good thoughts and the guarded recommendation to check out the three sentence ficathon. The recommendation is made cautiously because once you start scrolling through the 30+ pages of prompts and comments, you'll end up in a TV Tropes sort of daze and 4 hours have passed. It has slowed down a bit, and I didn't post much as I've been writing AW. There are wonderful, wonderful things there. Like a perfect bite-sized piece of chocolate, with no calories or fat.

I did do this one for

metonomia Narnia, Susan, by any other name
As the Gentle Queen, she favors Narnian scarlet silks with gold thread, carries a bow and a horn, and diplomatically finesses advantageous terms from the Empire of Telmar. As Mme. Jeanne-Louise Lambert, code named Rat, she wears a shabby dress and thick soled shoes, carries a camera and a pistol in her handbag, and reports to England on the Nazis' progress on the anti-tank gun installation at the Bénouville garrison in Normandy. Susan, by any name, serves her country.

And, Mrs. Pevensie has a first name! I finally decided, what the heck, everyone calls her Helen because of the films, so Helen she is. And this is an excerpt of a letter that Ruby writes to her in advance of Christmas:

From: Miss Ruby Smith
Impington Lane
Impington
Cambridgeshire

To: Mrs. John Pevensie
Finchley Road
Finchley
Barnet, London

Dear Helen:

Think nothing of the shopping list you provided to me. Jack, Tom and I are so thankful that you have opened your home to us. I would’ve been ashamed if you hadn’t let us add things. Jack’s had a hard time until he met Edmund and Lucy and they’ve been really good friends to him. You have growing boys and I know Jack is always looking for third and fourth helpings.

I took your very small shopping list to the Army PX and added to it. For GIs eating in English homes, we get rations to bring that include fruit juice, evaporated milk, peas, bacon, sugar, coffee, lard or shortening (I took lard), butter, and rice. With our household PX coupons, I can also bring chocolate bars, chewing gum, and other candy for the children, canned fruit, beans, sardines, and olives, flour, cheese and potatoes. Also, I noticed that soap is now being rationed and I have seen very little bathroom tissue at our store in Impington, so I shall bring some of both. We have rum in the house, so I shall bring that for a punch.

You asked about a pudding because you couldn’t find one in London? The PX had some boxes of Jell-O pudding and flavored and unflavored gelatin. I will sometimes make a single pie crust to save on flour and fat and add a flavored pudding or gelatin filling to it. But I don’t think that is what you had in mind at all since you don’t add suet, dried fruit, or liquor to Jell-O. I saw a recipe from the Ministry of Food that suggested carrot, bread crumbs and prunes for a steamed Christmas pudding. So using that as I guide, I bought dried fruit, including prunes, currants, and raisins, so maybe you can make a pudding?
...
I know the Army has mighty logistics, but trying to plan a Christmas meal in wartime is as complicated, if you ask me.
...
Sincerely,
Ruby

A huge thanks to

wellinghall and

adaese for their help with this. They also directed me to this awesome little book:
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942

As I was researching, I learned that there was a 1938 Jack Benny program sponsored by the makers of Jell-O. The wriggly stuff has been around a really long time. And speaking of Jell-O and not eating all the cookies, I'll post here a favorite cookie recipe of mine. Tomorrow, I'll do a separate recipe exchange post and I hope that others will share their recipes for holiday food traditions and favorites. I am going to dig up the lime Jell-O and pretzel recipe, just for the hell of it.

Chewy Ginger Cookies
4 ½ cups flour
4 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 ½ cups shortening (like Crisco all vegetable shortening)
2 cups white granulated sugar (I may substitute some brown sugar)
2 eggs
½ cup molasses
¾ cup (or more) coarse sugar for rolling (colored, even!)

Stir together first 5 dry ingredients
Beat shortening for 30 seconds, add eggs, molasses and mix until combined. Add the 2 cups sugar and then slowly add in flour/spice mixture.

At this point, I refrigerate the dough until it is easier to handle or pack it in plastic bags and freeze it. When I’m ready to bake, I preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I roll the dough into small balls (as large or small as you like), roll them in the coarse sugar and bake on a parchment lined cookie sheet. You do not need to grease the pan. Baking time, depending on size of cookie, may be 8 to 14 minutes.

They should be a chewy ginger cookie, not crisp. The shortening gives you that chewy texture, which I prefer. If you start substituting butter, you’ll get more spread and less chew, which when you think about it, has applicability in the broader world beyond cookies.
Adapted (mostly stolen) from Better Homes and Gardens, Christmas Cookies, 2002
In RL, as you might have gathered, I've spent the last 20+ years working at the intersection of law, healthcare regulation, science, public health and policy. The tortured regulatory history of the Plan B "morning after" pill is one I have followed closely for about the last 10 years and yesterday's decision was, as my Tweets and Tumblr feed indicated, profoundly disturbing to me. If you'd like to vent to me on the subject privately, you'll find a very willing listener and my responses are likely to be pretty impassioned.

Back to our regularly scheduled escape from It All.

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All the food! Nomnomnom I shall be trying out that recipe at some point, thankyou :)))

And that decision - *tries very hard to say something objective about it and fails miserably* I don't think I can say anything about that at the moment.

But yes, happy things :)))

See below discussion about vegetable shortening in the UK. I hope you'll share something too!

I just emailed a big rant to

harmony_lover about the decision. RAWRRR

The recipe sounds tasty (I love ginger!), but two questions: can I substitute butter for shortening and treacle for molasses? From my vague understanding I believe this to be the case. If you don't know off thte top of your head I shall dust off my google-fu, but have no time right now as am late for work... oops. :)

Thanks to google fu, I learned that black treacle is the same as molasses. I've used Lyle's Golden Syrup in recipes that call for corn syrup (more on that tomorrow). The issue of substituting butter for vegetable shortening is, alas, not quite so simple. While butter imparts that delicate flavor, whereas vegetable shortening is flavor-less, shortening has a higher melting point than butter. Consequently, the more butter, the greater the "spread"' and the less chewy. Sometimes you can increase the "chew" and reduce the spread by switching out white sugar for brown, freezing the dough and the cookie sheets, and playing with cooking times. However, if you do a straight shortening to butter switch, you are going to get a much different cookie -- it will be very thin. You can get organic and trans fat free all vegetable shortening in US supermarkets. If you try it, you probably want to make a much smaller test batch (with over 4.5 cups of flour (about 520 grams?), this is a BIG batch of cookies.

Hm there's only one problem with US supermarkets, I'm in the UK! :) I think of lard as shortening, usually used for savoury shortcrust pastry, but I don't think the flavour would work so well with sweet cookies. Maybe some vegetable oil or margarine? This may require some experimentation!

Ah, my Mum-who-knows-all says vegetable suet is what I'll need. Maybe I'll experiment anyway, any excuse to be eating cookies!

It's funny. When I was in Eastern Europe in the early to mid-90s, we could buy American Crisco, which I did, to make pastry crusts. It comes in a blue tin with a cherry pie on it and the Romanians assumed there was cherry pie inside. Given that I have vegetarians and Muslims in the family and I often bake for them, I never use lard. I had assumed (ha ha) that vegetable shortening would be known to bakers worldwide. Crisco is ubiquitous here and a basic pantry ingredient for all bakers. Thank you to google fu, I found this entry:

Vegetable shortening is a white, solid fat made from vegetable oils. In the UK it is sold under the brand names Trex, Flora White or Cookeen. In the US Crisco is the best known and there is also an organic solid vegetable shortening made by Earth Balance. In Australia the best known brand is Copha.

Vegetable shortening gives the scones and also pastry a flaky texture which butter cannot replicate. It is usually used in combination with butter to give the best combination of flakiness and flavour. Vegetable oil is not s great substitute as it is too liquid and so cannot be rubbed or cut into the flour. Lard is the best substitute if you don't mind animal fats. If you can't get any of these then butter can be used but the texture of the scones will be slightly different.

Baking soda is known as bicarbonate of soda in the UK
Ask Nigella

This does make me wonder, if it is not a common ingredient in European biscuit (cookie) baking, if your baked product, as a rule, tends to be different than ours. Granted, American cookies have wide variations in, among other things, the types of fat used. Maybe European cookies tend to be less chewy and more buttery, crisper, and flatter? Or the chewiness comes from the addition of different ingredients like nuts and dried fruit? Do you use much brown sugar in your baking? A standard cookie recipe from my batter-stained cookie books would often include both butter and shortening (to balance flavor vs. spread/chewiness) and white and brown sugars.

Cookies and biscuits are different beasties over here. Cookies, like your recipe, are larger and chewier than biscuits and are thought of as American. I don't know about biscuits in the rest of Europe, but the native ones are definitely hard and crispy and usually made with butter. They come in as vast a range as (I'm sure!) American cookies. Spiced biscuits, like ginger ones, tend to use more brown sugar. These are traditional Christmas biscuits (at least in our house). Being all butter is usually used as a selling point for biscuits you buy too, Scottish shortbread being a good example of that.

We have Flora White in our fridge, I've just never made the connection with suet=shortening because I think of suet as savoury too- used in dumplings and steak and kidney pudding etc.

Oooh I love ginger cookies. Spice cookies are my vice. I would rather have any kind of spice cookie than chocolate chip, even.

Love the rationing details... I have a real ration book that belonged to my grandmother and treasure it.

These cookies are the favorite in our house. Given a choice between these and chocolate or sugar, these always win out. It's funny, but my sister in law is Turkish and she does not like the tastes of ginger, root beer, and molasses. They were not part of her culture or palate and she's not been able to acquire a taste for them.

LOL at the idea of Christmas pudding ingredients suspended in jello in pastry. Laughter cut short by mention of jello & pretzel, and has now been replaced by utter bogglement. Also, yay for Mme Jeanne-Louise Lambert (aka Rat)!

Hmm. I was thinking of making ginger cookies for visiting nieces over Christmas, but was planning the sort you can cut into interesting shapes. Decisions, decisions.

I shall find the lime green jello and pretzel recipe and share it. It has lemon-lime soda in it too, as I recall. Very special. My Minnesota cookbook has a whole chapter devoted to jello recipes. It has a treasured place alongside my 1960s Women's league cookbook: "Chilled Senegalese is perfect at a polo match. As for field trials, mugs of Boula make wiser solace than straight shots when your prize pointer has disgraced you by chasing a squirrel."

Much excitement over Mme Lambert! I can't wait to see more of her adventures! Also, I'm torn over Helen's naming. On one hand, I do like the name and it fits her, but now she's named and I can't speculate anymore on what would be a good name for her! And I know fully what you mean about the three sentence ficathon, the only reason I haven't joined in is that I don't want to get sucked in when I have finals, then the GRE and then I'm going to be sans internet for the better part of a month! But when I get back from all that I'm thinking of creating an LJ and joining in. And do not get me started on the decision. Makes me so angry.

~LotL

yes, come to the ~~Dark Side~~ we have lots of memes and comment fic. And good luck getting through it all!!! As for Plan B, yeah, I wrote a long rant to

harmony_lover about it and talked with some colleagues about it today at a party. Sigh. ~~I wrote more and just struck it out. There are great links to information about it everywhere. and just struck out even more~~

I shall! (Also, you have cookie recipes!) I just don't want to join up and disappear for a month. And thanks! And yup.
~LotL

Useless snippet of information: shaving soap was not rationed during WWII, and (at a pinch) could be used for other washing / cleaning purposes.

Thank you for useless and useful snippets!

Oh, my gosh! P.D. James and P&P! That has to be a wonderful combination. :) And the cookie recipe exchange is a wonderful idea - I shall try to remember to put up at least one for you, come tomorrow. :)

And yes, the Plan B. More about that in a PM.

I know! When I saw the review of the book in the paper this morning, I thought, gosh I wonder who the author is and if I've read her fan fic. oops. it's PD JAMES!!!

I think it's really brilliant of her to suddenly do this, after so many years of writing amazing mysteries. It just seems like she's sort of winking at the world and saying "Hi there, I love P&P too and so I'm going to write some fanfic for you!" :) It should be really fun to read.

That Instruction booklet seems to be both informative and highly entertaining. :-) I love this quote from it: The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap.

So, so true! Even by today's standards, I've had people complain to me about how hard it is to find a cup of regular (American) coffee over there. I, on the other hand, love that I can get a cup of tea anywhere in England.

At one point, I had come up with a name for Mrs. Pevensie should she ever appear in any of my works but now, I've forgotten. Was definitely not going to be Helen, and I thought I found something appropriate to that era.

The book is a little tiny thing, but so insightful. It caused a huge to do in England because it provided the English with a view of how others viewed them. "You will have more difficulty with some of the local dialects. It may comfort you to know that a farmer or villager from Cornwall very often cant' understand a farmer or villager in Yorkshire." and "There are housewives in aprons and youngsters in knee pants in Britain who have lived through more high explosives in air raids than many soldiers saw in first class barrages in the last war."

It begins with the observation that you, American GI, are coming from a country that was at war. Once you got on the boat, you were in a war zone.

I'm very fond of thinking of Mrs. Pevensie as Helen, and the name works - thought I like the idea of Ruth, too, and it would definitely be era-appropriate.

I rather like Helen Pevensie, too... it's more realistic, after all, for common era-appropriate names to be... well, common! It's rare when a story dares to have characters share the same name, though it happens in real life all the time. If I recall, I think ASOIAF has characters with the same names, and I admire it for that.

Anyway, Mrs. Pevensie is Helen in my canon. And I actually have a bit written about the coincidence... one of the first things written for my NBB.

You know, I've seen that before, that the name Helen is not age appropriate? Except that Helen was the 2nd most popular name in the US at least in 1910? So, figure 32 years later? And Frank's wife was named Helen, so it must not have been that uncommon for Lewis to use? I remember this because I was originally going to name Mary as "Helen" -- the name of James Herriot's wife in All Creatures Great and Small and I researched it and found it to be more or less appropriate and then changed it when I realized the films called her Helen. So... go figure. Who knew?

I love that you can just as easily get a pot of tea in a pub as a pint of beer, sparing you the choice of going either to the bar (for beer) or the cafe (for tea). As a (mostly) non-drinker these days, I found that extremely practical.

Ack, I just saw this! After I posted a gingersnap recipe over on your exchange... whoops!

Then again, there is no such thing as too many good cookie recipes, similar or no...

Oooh! I love it when we see people interacting for the first time as the connections draw tighter! Ruby's voice is great here (one or two word choices struck me as "not British" and then I remembered I was reading an American character and had to remove the British accent that my brain normally uses for Narnia fic).

I'm also really looking forward to the eventual meeting between Mrs. Pevensie and Polly Plummer that was promised as a cliffhanger back in chapter 9. I do hope Polly doesn't manage to evade it for too long. Your Mrs. Pevensie fascinates me by being both bewildered by the changes in her children, but far less clueless than anyone expects. And film or not, I rather like Helen as her first name.

As for that decision- blatant politics, and there's no way to put lipstick on that pig.

Lipstick and wings on pigs. yep. Just. Gah. Horrible. I spent the day reading trade press about it, including a very good piece in Forbes of all places.

I've been struggling with the chapter, as always, in part because of my desire to move things along and so to put Mrs. P further along. I have a whole section with Susan where I wonder if I should just omit it. 11,000 words, still going and very rambly. Sigh. I keep plugging along but sometimes the lack of ability to ramble at someone does make this more difficult than it needs to be. Also I stabbed more forefinger on my right hand with a fork and it hurts ti type!! Good luck with your deadlines!!

Oh no! Typing injury! I do think we should hear a bit more of Susan's perspective before "Rat and Sword Go To War". We've seen the least of her in AW, and after seeing so much of her perspective in TQSiT, I'm missing her a bit. Whether that means keeping the whole section or not I don't know, but I'd personally like to see her a bit. Feel free to ramble at me in a message if you'd like! My work proceeds slowly but at the moment I think I'll make it :-)

Thanks, maybe I will, but I really don't like to suck up people's time. Given the time difference, I usually see your responses in the middle of my night. I try to read them on the iPhone and I invariably forget they were there because I'm really asleep when I see them.

The point about Susan is well taken. I have something short already. the real issue is that if Mrs. P. is recognizing Susan is going to be leaving school and at least headed off for somewhere to do something -- does mom see France is in the picture, or is that just too remote? -- there is less for her to discuss with Polly. How much does mom understand/see at this point? One approach is that Mrs. P. sees all this, and recognizes as a matter of patriotic duty and maternal pride, that she cannot keep Susan back, but she still wants to know how and why and the details.

I've not written much in a full day and am sort of stuck at 12,000 words. ugh.

Edited 2011-12-15 04:12 (UTC)

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The happiest time of the year? EDIT

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