Berries!

Find my historical fiction here

One thing consistent in all my novels is my characters like to eat! I love to write food as sustenance, satisfaction, medicinal, a gesture of love (or hate, in the case of poisoned!).  What a great way to plum (you should excuse the expression) the depths of plot, character and the senses of smell and taste on the page!

Summer fruits are part of this glorious season. Berries, rhubarb, peaches…perfection! I am lucky enough to have all growing in my small side-of-the-house garden.

 Here in New England, rustic summer fruit baking includes pies, slumps, cobblers, buckles, grunts, crumbles and crisps.

What's the difference? Not a lot. The basic formula: fruit combined with some sort of sweet batter or streusel or crumble topping. And they all taste better with a dollop of ice cream, yogurt or whipped cream.  A slump and a grunt are the same thing. So are a crumble and a crisp.

Peach Melba Pie

Am I making you hungry? Here are some recipes from the great King Arthur Flour site to get you started:

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/easy-fruit-cobbler-recipe

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/peachberry-buckle-recipe

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/summer-fruit-crisp-recipe

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-bake-fresh-strawberry-pie-recipe

Happy baking!

The Kansas Flu Pandemic?

                                    Please click this link for book and purchase information


COVID-19 piqued my interest in the Spanish flu, which devastated the world from 1918-1920. This led me to place library holds on several e-books about the subject. The first one available was More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War by Kenneth C. Davis. This short book, aimed at young adult readers, turned out to be an excellent primer on the pandemic. It taught me a lot I didn't know.

The Spanish flu was first noticed in Haskell County, Kansas in January, 1918. Two months later an outbreak appeared in a Kansas army training camp. More outbreaks erupted at other camps in the United States as the country prepared to enter World War I. US troops brought the disease to Europe and passed it on to other allied soldiers and civilians. German soldiers picked it up from allied prisoners they released.

Crowded sleeping area at Naval Training Station, San Francisco, California

Both sides in the war supressed news reports on the disease, to keep up morale and not let the enemy know their troops were weakened. Spain was neutral in WWI, which freed journalists to broadcast reports on the new disease striking their fellow citizens, including the king of Spain. The name Spanish flu stuck. To this day, Spain would like that error fixed. I might suggest calling it the Kansas flu pandemic, but the World Health Organization now recommends that we no longer name diseases after places to avoid the negative effects on nations, people and economies. To add to the controversy, some researchers speculate the Spanish flu originated in France, China or the eastern USA. Recent studies on recovered samples of the virus suggest it was initially transmitted by a bird.

Unlike most viruses, the Spanish flu, H1N1 influenza A virus, attacked a disproportionate number of healthy, young adults. One theory for this is that their strong immune systems overreacted. Another is that an earlier strain of the virus gave many in the older generation immunity. It's now estimated that the Spanish flu's four waves killed close to 100 million people worldwide , about 1/20th of those alive at the time. It is history's second most lethal pandemic, after the Black Death. 

Sprinkled through More Deadly Than War are stories of historical figures who contracted the disease. In addition to the Spanish king, Walt Disney and artist Edvard Munch recovered. US President Donald Trump's grandfather was an early victim. According to the family account, Frederick Trump was walking down a New York City street, when he suddenly took ill. He died the next day. The cruel virus tended to act swiftly. Some called it the three day fever. 

Was Edvard Munch's agonized painting "The Scream" partially inspired by his suffering from the Spanish flu?

The primary advice in 1918 for escaping the Spanish flu sounds familiar to people living through COVID-19 today. 

• Wash your hands. 
• Maintain a social distance. 
• Avoid crowds. 

A friend sent me links to my home city Calgary's history of the Spanish flu. We know the precise day the disease arrived - Oct 2, 2018, when a train from eastern Canada brought patients to Calgary's isolation hospital. Unfortunately, the measure didn't isolate the disease from Calgary residents. An estimated 38,000 people in our province of Alberta contracted the Spanish flu; 4,000 died.

Poster in 1918 Calgary, courtesy Glenbow Museum

Will my interest in the Spanish flu filter to my fiction writing? I'm mulling potential ideas for my next Calgary mystery novel.  

The Language of Flowers by Karla Stover

            
Murder in Tacoma WA.              Murder on Hood Canal   Gothic Mystery

and a bunch of shorts on Amazon

"I need an idea for my blog," I said to my husband.

"Why not flowers," he said, after a moment's reflection."

At the time, we were hiking in the woods and and admiring a native shrub called Ocean spray.

Where we live, the first thing to bloom is camas, a beautiful blue flower that was once very important to the local Native American diet. It's followed by Scotch broom, a really invasive shrub with pretty yellow blooms. A group of nuns who settled in Steilacoom, WA. get the blame for bringing in the seeds but they could just as well been in on the clothing sailors wore (the seeds not the nuns).

Rhododendrons follow, then daisies, fox glove, sweet peas and now the Ocean spray which is a low-growing shrub of droopy cream-colored flowers. However, none of these have anything to do with the language of flowers.

When I was little and we were poor, new books were rare. Instead, I inherited my mother's from when she was a girl. One of them had four complete books in one: Ruth Fielding and the Red Mill; Billie Bradley and her Inheritance; Peggy Lee and Michael; and Linger-Nots and the Mystery House. In those days, children's books didn't have to have  message; they just told stories. In the case of the Mystery House, it was an old home with a hidden room. The Linger-Nots found the room by decoding a sampler based on the flowers the maker had stitched in. I thought that was fascinating.

Back then, researching was much more difficult than it is now, but eventually I stumbled on The Language of Flowers illustrated by Kate Greenaway and published in 1884. It's still available and here's how Amazon describes the book:

 "Presents one of the most enchanting customs of the early 19th century - communicating through flowers instead of words. Hundreds of plants and flowers were given meaning ranging from the warm, simple "I love" of the red chrysanthemum to the disquieting message of the currant "thy frown will kill me." The book glows with Kate Greenaway's exquisite illustrations of the Victorian world from her 1884 book, Language of Flowers. An alphabetical listing of over 700 flowers and plants with their meanings - and a cross-index by meanings." It goes on to say, " shares the tradition, sparked by renewed Victoria era interest in botany and exotic plants and of using flowers as a means of covert communication [that means flirting or courting]an insight into a bygone era when the gift of Tamsy [ supposed to be tansy] was a declaration of war, and a Garden Daisy meant 'I share your sentiments,'this text is a real treasure."

The idea so intrigued me, I wrote a short story, a murder mystery where before she dies conveniently in her conservatory, the murder victim up ends pots of flowers in order to tell 'who dun it.' I called it "Flower Power" and sold it to a now defunct magazine for a minuscule amount.

So, what are the woods and fields where we walk telling us? Well, the rhododendrons are saying, "beware, danger and the wild daisies proclaim "I will think of it" (there are 5 different kinds of daisies in the book, each with its own meaning). The foxgloves aren't buying that, they're boldly declaring "insincerity." They might also be slamming the sweet pea's "delicate pleasures."

Flowers are important for novelists. Several years ago I read a novel-based-on-fact about a woman named Hulda Kruger who develop an important lilac garden in Woodland Washington one hundred or so years ago. The author had Hulda creating a bouquet out of hyacinths, a spring bloomer and other things that bloom in autumn. The blatant inaccuracy totally ruined the book for me.

I wonder if anyone knows or even cares about this totally cool bit of history. If so, here's a message from me, "I wish you Sweet Basil and Spruce Pine. May coronella . . . . . . . . . .