Chicken Tragedy

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Happy January Birthdays to 

Alexander Hamilton, January 11

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, January 27

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     Just opened an old vegetarian cookbook my mother-in-law gave me in 1990, back when she was still alive and kicking. I re-read the dedication she'd written, and found myself remembering this important relationship. 

    

    Carol was a strong New England Woman, a true life version of that stern, hardy archtype. She had been a valedictorian of her city highschool, and entered college to study chemistry. After she married in the middle of her sophomore year, she swallowed her pride and abandoned her dreams and scrubbed floors and cleaned houses to support her husband who would eventually earn a Doctorate in Physics from MIT. As was customary, back in the 40's, their relatives on both sides left them to struggle through however they could.

    When her son and I married, we were both feckless teens, and there was not much genuine hope expressed by relatives on either side that our union would last, although support for continued education did arrive. I had married, knowing how to boil water, fry a burger, make fudge, but not much else other than English Literature, European History and how to set a table for a cream tea. 

    Now, I had to get serious about the gigantic undertaking that is marriage, and to prove the doubters wrong. I set about seriously studying the basics of what I believed a "proper" wife needed to know. This began with the venerable Joy of Cooking, a gift from my husband's maternal grandmother, which I dutifully studied, just like a textbook, from beginning to end. When cooking today, I still hear words of culinary wisdom from that old cookbook coming to mind.

    Several years later, my husband had graduated and was working his first job. While he was building programs for mainframes, I'd learned cooking, cleaning and baby care. One winter, I hosted a dinner for my in-laws, who came down from Lexington, MA to our ramshackle farmhouse. I was, as you might imagine, anxious about this, especially when the guests would be my scary, erudite father-in-law, my super home-maker mother-in-law, and my husband's three teen siblings. The kids-in-law knew I could make great cookies ("just like Mom's") but I'd never had to cook so much for so many, and do it on our household's supremely tight budget. 

    I settled on a recipe from The Joy, called "Hunter's Chicken." For so many guests, however, I'd need to get a larger chicken than the three pound version in the recipe, so I searched in my largest local grocery store, the one which had the most variety. The chicken was to be served over boiled spaghetti, but this was the Sixties, so I used cooked brown rice for the base. The chicken was browned, then simmered for 45 minutes in white wine, stock, fresh mushrooms, thyme, bay leaves, marjoram, salt, pepper, and tomato sauce. Afterward, it was placed on the rice and then baked. 

    The guests arrived, and the main dish smelled mouth-watering. I'd baked bread and made salad. For dessert, Carol's famous "Cowboy Cookies" and ice cream. I set the table with a cloth and linen napkins, and with all the silverware we possessed. My father-in-law, seated at the head of the table, volunteered to cut up the chicken, now sitting before him in an enormous cassarole dish. 

    After all that time cooking, I couldn't believe my eyes when his knife could barely penetrate the flesh. All this time and effort, and I'd produced a Rubber Chicken! The youngest child in the family giggled. My face burned with the shame of failure. 

    My father-in-law and mother-in-law leaned over to inspect the chicken, and Carol said, "You bought a fowl, not a roasting chicken. Fowl--old hen--has to be cooked for hours and then you cut it up for soup." 

    They were sufficiently good-hearted to be amused, although they were let down. The aromas in the house remained, full of that false promise.  This, it seemed, was a classic new cook's mistake. I thought I was going to die on the spot, but instead I said, while gesturing at the dish, "The recipe is called "Hunter's Chicken," but instead it's Chicken Tragedy."  Everyone burst out laughing, including--much to my relief--the stern in-laws. We dined on brown rice with the tasty mushroom/tomato sauce and lots of homemade bread and butter and finished with cookies and ice cream and coffee.  

    Twenty years later, I received the vegetarian cookbook, the one which began this reminiscence. 

    It is dedicated to "Juliet, who sure has come a long way from her 'Chicken Tragedy.'"

~~Juliet Waldron

About Elizabeth II -- Reminiscence

 

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 Inevitable that several of us BWL authors will write about the death of Queen Elizabeth, so here's my contribution. I still can't quite believe she is gone, even after ten days of a most Royal sendoff. She's been The Queen for most of my life. I do remember George VI's death, however, as this was also big news at our house. My parents discussed how brave the king had been, during the war, staying in London with his people, throughout the nightly bombing. 

On the great stage of today's (apparently) endless train of planetary disasters, her death doesn't mean much beyond the UK and the remaining commonwealth nations, but how well I remember Elizabeth's coronation, which took place when I was eight. With an Anglophile Mom, I couldn't help hearing--and viewing (for a new wonder, a television had just arrived in our home) an English Coronation, full of glittering regalia and history. 

(Free Image from Pixabay)

The idea of showing this rite to the public had been much debated beforehand--such a break with tradition! Those grainy black-and-white images of a beautiful young Queen inside her fairy-tale golden carriage, riding through gray, battered, postwar London, now all decked out beautifully for the celebration. The procession to the Abbey was followed by film of the mystery taking place inside. This was ground-breaking, this showing of so much of an ancient ritual to the public, but it proved to be a huge hit with the viewing public all over the world.  From now on, television would give those who liked to "royal watch" a whole new tool with which to engage. 

Anticipating the event, The New York Times was suddenly full of articles on the British royal family and also on English history, a news glut on a single subject, from the time of the death of King George VI onward to the crowning of the new, young queen.   From this time, I'd date my ever-increasing, ever-expanding, sixty year passion for learning about human history. 

https://www.amazon.com/Roan-Rose-Juliet-Waldron/dp/149224158X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2R221JXX8BYFN&keywords=Roan+Rose+Waldron&qid=1664379252&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjg0IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=roan+rose+waldron%2Caps%2C59&sr=8-1

Certainly, at first, this history was of the WASP kind, as that was the brand on offer at my house. I had a scrapbook filled with articles clipped from Newsweek, the NYT, Look, and whatever magazine resources we had that dealt with current events. I was not a tidy kid, so this was a messy affair of white paste and missing bits of text, but I was thoroughly engaged while making it. 

When Mom took me to England after her divorce, I ended up in a country boarding school in Penzance. Here, I found myself regularly singing "God Save the Queen." My 5th form classmates were rather surprised to learn I already knew the words, but, with a Mom like mine, this had been inevitable. I had been taught that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" so I adapted as fast as I could in all ways. 

I'd had no idea that a person could live on cabbage and potatoes and slices of brown bread and a single pat of butter, but that was what was on offer in boarding school, so I wolfed it down like everyone else. Post-war, even in the early sixties, things were tight and war-time frugality was still the order of the day. In winter, the school was kept at 45 F., and so our wool and flannel clothing was a necessity, not an affectation. We shared a once a week bath--3 girls bathed and washed their hair in the same tub. Therefore, the water was super hot to start, but I was often allowed that first bath by default, because no one else wanted to brave the temperature.

In London, while sightseeing, I saw huge open swathes of emptiness and broken bricks in some places, in others, like around St. Paul's Cathedral, there was an expansive green void on every side, where that huge ediface stood, white and shining, perfectly alone, a miracle of survival during the Blitz. 

.  

When Mom and I transferred ourselves to Barbardos, in what was then the British West Indies, we sang "God Save The Queen" there too. Barbados was part of the old British Commonwealth, and called Elizabeth II "Queen of Barbados," but I understand that this "Island in the Sun" has become a republic (as of November, 2021), and replaced the British Crowned head with a President, while remaining as part of the Commonwealth of Nations. English rule, begun in Barbados in 1627, has ended at last,  and with it, the days of Bajan schoolgirls singing "God Save the Queen."  

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--Juliet Waldron

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The difference 50 years makes...by Sheila Claydon

The copyright to the first book I ever had published, Golden Girl, reverted to me last year, and it has now been republished in its 3rd edition by Books We Love. Although I wrote this book in 1980, it is set in the early sixties. The story is loosely based on some of the experiences I had when I was working as a secretary in London (UK) at that time.

Fast forward to my most recently published book, Remembering Rose, and my goodness what a difference 50 years makes.

The characters behave differently, speak differently, live differently. Nowadays we are so used to technology that it's easy to forget that there were no cell phones in the 1960s, nor did we use computers, and the Internet wasn't even a twinkle in someone's eye! No social media then. Messages were scribbled on scraps of paper. Secretaries (and there were many secretaries in the 1960s) routinely typed a top copy and 2 carbon copies. Many companies had a central filing department and a typing pool. Tippex and typewriter rubbers were a girl's best friend. There were no printers so multiple copies had to be produced on a Roneo machine. Telephones were answered by switchboard operators who connected incoming and outgoing calls to individual numbers. I could go on... Then there were the office politics. In the 1960s (at least in my experience) secretaries were all girls and the people they worked for were mostly men. And I use the word 'girls' advisedly, because that is what most of them were. They usually married early and disappeared a couple of years later to become stay-at-home mums. I'm generalising of course, but in London at least, few secretaries broke the mould, so Lisa's behaviour in Golden Girl is true to its time.

Rachel, the heroine in Remembering Rose, is a very different character from Lisa. She's far less compliant for a start.  Being a stay-at-home mum bores her to distraction, and so does her long suffering husband, until Rose reminds her why she married him in the first place. Rachel keeps secrets, flirts, nags, loses her temper, is even downright bitchy on occasion, and all this is mixed in with love, loyalty, compassion and kindness. In fact Rachel is like most of us, a flawed human being with a heart, whereas Lisa, in Golden Girl, is sometimes too good and too naive to be true.

The difference is not just down to changing times either. It is also down to the writer as well. How I understood the world in the 1960s is very different from how I understand it now. Also the requirements of romantic fiction have changed. Lisa is a girl of her time, and so is Rachel. Reading the two books back to back is like travelling through history. Not a time machine exactly, but the next best thing.

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/claydon-sheila-romance/

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Women's Work Memories--Doing the Laundry

                        http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion   ISBN: 1771456744

A few things have changed for women, if not all that much on the rights side--we seem to be going backwards at the moment--however, in the material world, the traditional hard work of housekeeping has grown much easier. Laundry is one of those revolutionized tasks. Still, like cleaning the toilet, another traditionally designated woman’s work, I'd thought I'd share some memories about some of the things I've seen during my own 70+ years of life. 

I wonder how many of you can also look back on these same changes, or if you have some unique stories of your own. I’m going to move through time—my little slice of it--regarding laundry day.

The first laundry days I remember was at Grandpa’s house where we took our clothes for a familial Saturday wash, because they had a machine, a rockin’ and rollin’ wringer washer in the basement. Running the wet clothes through the wringer was men’s work in my family, although the women did the rest: pre-sort, load, hang, fold, dry, and iron. (Remember ironing? The day devoted to the task, taking the clothes out of the hamper and dampening them with a spritz or a sprinkle—the ones from a little top you bought at the Five and Dime to attach to the top of a coke bottle? The back ache/neck crick from standing for hours with a moving extended arm, the pre-air conditioning summer heat?)

And, of course, for small children, there were dire, but necessary, warnings.

Beware the dreaded wringer in which careless children get their arms caught and broken and maybe even dragged in and squished to death!  And don’t forget; the release bar to open the jaws is along the top, so…!

In the early Sixties, life took my mother and me to Barbados in the West Indies. It was not the shiny tourist trap it is now. At one time, we lived in the countryside which meant in a big temporarily for rent house—the “Bajan” owners were in the UK, attending to some business there. The big white house with louvered windows stood in a grove of large trees surrounded by what seemed to be almost endless cane fields. A maid from a cluster of houses further down the road, came along with the rent—that is, mother paid her the going rate to stay on with us and do laundry and some weekly housework, so that she would be support in the regular owner’s prolonged absence.

It was a long bus ride from Bridgetown where my school was, and in the evening, when I got home, I’d enter a small lane that had a bridge over a steep-sided, fast moving creek. Down below, among the rocks, local women always seemed to be doing laundry. Many small children, wearing undershirts and nothing else, crouched and played in the water, like little kids everywhere. Here, sometimes, I’d see Elsie, who worked for us, banging a piece of clothing I’d recognize as mine, on a rock as if it had done some terrible crime and needed punishment. First she’d scrub up lather from a big cake of Fels Naphtha soap which she kept beside her balanced on a rock. Next, she’d pound, and last she’d rinse it out in the stream. When I saw that laundry method for the first time, I came to fully appreciate the high tech of the chugging basement wringer washer at Grandpa’s.

Later, after coming back to the US, entering college and getting married—all in quick time order—my husband, new baby and I lived in an apartment building which rented to married students. It was a spacious old side by side duplex, now split into four apartments. I worked part time--part time school--in order to afford my first washing machine, a long-lived trendy bronze color Sears Kenmore top loader. Wet wash was hung from the back porch on a super long reel line. 

The kindly owner of our building had set lines up for both upstairs and downstairs apartments, although the tenants overhead had to hang their laundry while leaning out a window. As this was Massachusetts, sometimes it was too wet or too snowy or cold, so we all had drying racks for such occasions. As everyone knows, with babies, there is always a lot of laundry. And with diapers, it’s best to hang them out, even if they freeze for a day or so. 

As the old saying goes, “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” even if it’s 10 below...or in the 21st Century.   

~~Juliet Waldron

 http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi    Historical Novels by JW at Amazon

http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion   ISBN: 1771456744

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR - MARGARET TANNER

VIETNAM WAR

 At the risk of revealing my age, I have to say the 1960’s was my time. Mini-skirts, stilettos (I’ve got the bunions to prove it), beehive hair-dos, I couldn’t quite manage that, although I did tease the life out of my hair and regularly put in coloured rinses, French Plum or Rich Burgundy, were the colours I favoured. I can remember when the Beatles made their first visit out to Australia. A couple of girls I worked with were lucky enough to get tickets to their concerts, (we hated them, of course), they came to work the next days minus their voices, and stayed that way for about a week, because they had screamed so much.

We used manual typewriters in those days. One original and four copies of everything we typed. I don’t know how many blouses I ruined because I got ink on the sleeves from changing the typewriter ribbon or the black stuff off the carbon paper.

During this time the Vietnam War loomed in the background. The Australian government introduced conscription. It was in the form of a ballot, or the death lottery as many called it. All twenty year old males had to register, their birth dates were put into a barrel. A certain number were drawn out, and those young men had to report to the army and subsequently many of them were sent to Vietnam. This of course caused severe bitterness and division in the community, and even though the government denied it, was subject to abuse and unfairness. Rich men kept their sons at university so they didn’t have to go.  Conscientious objectors were thrown into prison. Only sons were called up, yet families with two or three eligible males didn’t have any of their boys called up.

I only had one brother, and I can clearly remember my father (a World War 2 veteran) vowing, that if his son got called up, he would protest on the steps of the parliament with a placard on his back.

There were protests marches, anti-war demonstrations, and things often turned violent. Not that I went to any of the protest marches, but a cousin of mine did and got trampled by a police horse. A very turbulent time in our history and I was right in the middle of it.

BLURB:  MAKE LOVE NOT WAR

Make love, not war was the catch cry of the 1960’s. Against a background of anti-war demonstrations, hippies and free love, Caroline’s life is in turmoil. Her soldier brother is on his way to the jungles of Vietnam. She discovers she is pregnant with her wealthy boss’ baby, and her draft dodger friend is on the run and needs her help. 

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Love-Not-War-ebook/dp/B0094WQOPU/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346642917&sr=1-12&keywords=margaret+tanner

 

BIO:  Margaret Tanner is a multi-published award winning Australian author. She loves delving into the pages of history as she carries out research for her historical romance novels, and prides herself on being historically accurate. No book is too old or tattered for her to trawl through, no museum too dusty, or cemetery too overgrown. Many of her novels have been inspired by true events, with one being written around the hardships and triumphs of her pioneering ancestors in frontier Australia.

As part of her research she has visited the World War 1 battlefields in France and Belgium, a truly poignant experience.

Margaret is married with three grown up sons, and two gorgeous little granddaughters.

Outside of her family and friends, writing is her passion.

http://www.margarettanner.com