The happiest time of the year? EDIT

[rthstewart]

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.

Comments

[autumnia]

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.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

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.

[harmony-lover.livejournal.com]

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.

[snitchnipped.livejournal.com]

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.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

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?

[h-dash-h.livejournal.com]

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.