Posts Tagged ‘louisa may alcott’

Wintry Colorado can be an unforgiving place, especially with single-digit temperatures and March (usually our snowiest month) still ahead.  I’ve got tea to warm my fingers, but my thoughts are turning to food…the kinds of food my literary heroines would have enjoyed.  This morning I saw an article featuring a Mock Cherry Pie (recipe below) attributed to none other than Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame.  It made me wonder what other recipes actually attributed to “my” authors could be found online?

The yummy results follow.  Each is directly attributed to one of my favorite authors or one of her family members.  Also, how awful is it that I’ve given up sweets for Lent?  I know what I’ll be preparing Easter Sunday.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Mock Cherry Pie

Food fakery is a vital heroine skill.  Don’t have cherries?  Cranberries and raisins will do just as well!  This recipe is attributed to Maud, whose Marilla admonishes:  “You’ve got to keep your wits about you in cooking and not stop in the middle of things to let your thoughts rove all over creation.” (Prefer raspberry cordial or some other dishes mentioned in the Anne books?  This link’s for you.)

Pastry for a double-crust 9-inch pie
2 cups cranberries, chopped
1 cup raisins, chopped
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Line a 9-inch pie plate with half the pastry. Make a lattice crust with remaining dough.  In a saucepan, combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, flour and water; bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Stir in vanilla.  Turn filling into pastry-lined pie plate. Moisten edge with water and top with lattice crust.  Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees F and bake another 20 to 30 minutes, or until crust is nicely browned and filling is bubbly. Serves six.

Louisa May Alcott’s Blancmange

Did you ever read Little Women and wonder, like me, what the heck blancmange is?  I am led to believe that it is a kind of sweet, white flan, as sweet and white as the plump hands of Meg March, whom I can imagine creating this blancmange and complaining over her unfashionable gowns.  You will recall that Jo brings a blancmange to Laurie when he is sick as a sort of wedge into his house and heart.  She succeeds.  This recipe is attributed to Abba Alcott, Louisa’s mother.

2 tbsp arrowroot
1 quart milk
1/2 cup sugar, more to taste
1 pinch salt
Something savory – orange water, rose water, or lemon peel

Take two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to one quart of milk and a pinch of salt. Scald the milk, sweeten it with sugar to taste and then stir in the arrowroot, which must first be wet with some milk. Let it boil once. Orange water, rose water, or lemon peel can be used to flavor it. Pour it into molds to cool.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Gingerbread

Whenever I gain a pound, I blame Laura, whose description of crackling pig tails, bountiful pies, and tables laden with the goodness of hardy, sensible pioneer cooking are enough to drive any girl face-first into a pile of biscuits.  Though it’s easy to find recipes inspired by the Little House books, it’s harder to find ones directly attributed to Laura that aren’t protected by copyright.  Here’s one to start with:

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup lard (fine, shortening will do)
1 cup molasses
2 tsp baking soda
1 cup boiling water
3 cups flour
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs

Blend brown sugar with lard.  Mix in molasses until well-coated.  Dissolve baking soda in boiling water (be sure cup is full of water after foam runs off into cake mixture).  Mix well.  In a separate bowl, mix flour with spices and salt.  Sift into wet mixture and mix well; mixture will be “quite thin.”  Finally, add two well-beaten eggs and bake in a moderate (350 degrees) for thirty minutes.

One of the most gratifying parts of writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf was discovering the backstories behind the women who wrote some of my favorite books.  And it wasn’t all fun and friends.  During the course of the book, I got to look at the underbelly of some of these women’s lives:  depression, chronic illness, opium addiction, adultery, even suicide.   And you know what?  I loved every minute.

Why embrace the serious sides of my literary heroines when many of them left such happy, pert, intelligent women as their legacy?  (Anne of Green Gables or Lizzie Bennet, anyone?)  Why not just focus on the picture they wanted to present to the world…the picture of the productive, happy writer who left her dirty laundry between two covers and moved on with life?

I was reminded of this question when reading this article about Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dirty little opium secrets (or not-so-secrets, as the case may be).  For me, the answer is all about context.  When we look at the real lives of these writers, their accomplishments in the face of great trials and hardships are even more impressive.  Louisa May Alcott wrote her books in a state of constant, crushing financial worry…and if she hadn’t known what it was like to be poor, she could never have given us the image of four sisters sewing their way through dire straits and attempting to burden the load they must shoulder.  Could Charlotte Brontë have made Jane Eyre’s Lowood School so terrifying if she herself had not survived a similar experience?

Now that I know the backstory behind my favorite books, I feel even more grateful that these women took time out of their lives to give something to us, people they never met or even imagined.  Not that I subscribe to the thought that writers must be tortured (that’s probably material for a whole ‘nother post), but I think they’re at least allowed to be human.  When we deny a Jane Austen or a Frances Hodgson Burnett her humanity, we miss out on the rest of the story.

Yes, I’m still revising the book (on a Friday deadline, eek!), but I haven’t forgotten my readers or my heroines.  Luckily, the entire Internet and the rest of the world is busy producing interesting content on heroines at all times.  To wit:

• The new Louisa May Alcott movie that recently ran on American Masters on PBS.  I really enjoyed this film, even though I abhor historical reenactments in documentaries.  The best part was watching LMA’s biographers and great champions Madeleine Stern and Dr. Leona Rostenberg talk about figuring out that Louisa wrote pulp novels under the name of A.M. Barnard.  Their glee over this momentous literary discovery, half a decade after the fact, was contagious.  (Also, who doesn’t love elderly female scholars?)
• Lizzie Skurnick’s recent article on heroines in peril.  Though I don’t agree with the article entirely, I think it’s important to look at what heroines are doing and how it affects readers and viewers. (Thanks to Lorelei Laird for pointing me to this link.)
• Little House:  The Musical! also known as The Best Christmas Present Ever.  Though several anachronisms made me cringe (the Ingalls girls betting on a horse race?  I think not!), it was a great way to spend an evening.

Publishing a book is a saga, though I’d never presume to think it’s as exciting as the lives of the women writers I’m writing about (how very meta).  I just received a very incisive and encouraging revision letter from my editor at HarperCollins and as I go through the manuscript, adding layers and clarifying, I am reminded that the ability and opportunity to revise is in and of itself a blessing.

Think I’m being cheesy?  Just think of Louisa May Alcott, tart author of Little Women and other beloved girls’ classics, and the hurried way in which she had to write her books.  She was so busy sewing, going out as a servant, and caring for her impoverished family that she never had much time for revision.  In a way, though, much of her literary work was revision: editing out (sometimes ineffectively) her frustration over her ongoing poverty, her family’s crushing expectations, and her never-met ambitions.  Writing is rewriting, and Louy spent much time rewriting herself into something more socially acceptable than the clumsy, sarcastic, workaholic who was just as compelling as any of her heroines.

…[Jo] read several liberal offers from budding magazines for her to edit them gratis; one long letter from a young girl inconsolable because her favourite hero died, and ‘would dear Mrs Bhaer rewrite the tale, and make it end good?’ another from an irate boy denied an autograph, who darkly foretold financial ruin and loss of favour if she did not send him and all other fellows who asked autographs, photographs, and auto-biographical sketches; a minister wished to know her religion; and an undecided maiden asked which of her two lovers she should marry. These samples will suffice to show a few of the claims made on a busy woman’s time, and make my readers pardon Mrs Jo if she did not carefully reply to all.

- Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys

Think I’m giving an awful lot of screen space to Miss Alcott these days?  Yup.  I’ll admit it:  my interest in the woman who gave us Jo March has become somewhat of an obsession.  I’ll stop now lest I expose too much of my nerdiness up front.

There are many explanations for my seeming neglect of this blog, but for the time being I will merely point to the deadline looming up before me like the most ferocious of Louisa May Alcott’s vortices.  I’ll be back in late November…until then, hear Louy’s words about what I’ve been sucked into:

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and `fall into a vortex’, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her `scribbling suit’ consisted of a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask, with interest, “Does genius burn, Jo?” They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew, and not until the red bow was seen gaily erect upon the gifted brow, did anyone dare address Jo.

She did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her eyes, meals stood untasted, day and night were all too short to enjoy the happiness which blessed her only at such times, and made these hours worth living, even if they bore no other fruit. The devine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her `vortex’, hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

I’m deep in the thick of things, and writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf is simultaneously easier and more challenging than I thought it would be.  I feel kind of schizophrenic…by day, I’m instructing people on how best to use Twitter to promote their businesses and doing marketing plans.  But a huge part of me is busy sifting through the complexity of Louisa May Alcott’s relationship to her father and wondering about the architecture of corsetry in the Antebellum South.

Here are some tidbits I’ve come across in the past several weeks:

• Jane Eyre, illustrated:  A great collection of artistic interpretations of everyone’s favorite plane Jane, Jane Eyre
• Pioneer Girl:  A blog devoted to Laura Ingalls Wilder fact and fiction
• A fascinating look at the history of Times New Roman (and its connection to children’s book illustrator [famous for The Secret Garden and A Little Princess] Tasha Tudor)

Also, if you’re interested in issues of girls and boys reading (I sure know I am), check out my contribution to Newbery Honor winner and all around superstar Kirby Larson’s blog (coming next week sometime).  Preview here…