Canadian Historical Brides Northwest Territories and Nunavut revealed

Nits’it’ah Golika Xah (Fly Away Snow Goose)

Visit the Canadian Historical Brides blog for more about this exciting new series of Canadian historical fiction novels

http://bwlcanadianhistoricalbrides.blogspot.ca/

Our newest cover Fly Away Snow Goose will be released in December 2017. The cover was revealed by authors Juliet Waldron and John Wisdomkeeper on March 4.

About the Canadian Historical Brides - Northwest Territories and Nunavut

Yaotl and Sascho splashed along the shores of behchà, spears hefted, watching for the flash of fin to rise to the surface and sparkle in the sunlight. Tender feelings flushed their faces, so they laughed and teased one another with sprays of icy water. In the distance, the warning about the kwet'ı̨ı̨̀ (white Indian agents) sounds, but is unheard. 

Transport to the Fort Providence residential school is only the beginning of their trial, for the teachers intend “to kill the Indian" inside their pupils. Attempts to escape end mostly in failure and punishment, but Yaotl and Sascho, along with two others, will try. 

Wild geese, brave hearts together, it is do or die--homeward bound.

When It's Biscuit Makin' Time Down South by Gail Roughton

Meet Gail Roughton at Books We Love, Ltd.

Actually, it's always biscuit makin' time down South, where making biscuits has evolved over the years into an art form. It's one of the things we're famous for, one of the things every good cook prides herself on. Mind you, I doubt sincerely any resident of any other region of the United States ever turns down a homemade biscuit at any time, either, but down South, biscuits are taken very seriously. For our present purposes, let's clarify that the word biscuit herein refers to the term as used within the borders of the continental United States and, I believe, English-speaking Canada where it means a small, round quick bread with a crusty exterior and a soft, flaky interior, about the size of a roll (see illustration below) and not as the word is used in England and Australia, where it refers to a hard cookie. 

There's nothing better than a homemade biscuit slathered with butter. Different folks have their own preferences as to what else goes on their biscuits--jellies, jams, honey, gravy. Likewise, there's no rule as to what can go in a biscuit--cheese, ham, bacon, sausage, roast beef. There's no wrong way to eat a biscuit. There's no wrong time to eat a biscuit.  There are, however, several ways to make them. 

First, there’s the mix and pinch method.  My mother and several of my aunts employed this method, as did a few other great cooks I know, including the cook at the Courthouse Cafe, which real-life cafe served as the inspiration for The Scales of Justice Cafe in my novel Country Justice. 

Dump a pile of flour in a bowl. How much doesn’t matter.   Punch a hole in the middle of the pile of flour, a bowl within a bowl, as it were.  If it’s self-rising flour, that’s all you need, if it’s not, you need to add baking soda, salt, and if you like high-rising biscuits, some baking powder to the hole you’ve punched in the middle.  How much?  Heck, I don’t know.  A pinch, a dash, a splash.  Dip out, either by spoon, fork, or fingers, a dollop of shortening.  Like the flour, how much shortening doesn’t really matter, because if you’ve done it enough, you know how many biscuits any size dollop’s going to make.  And besides, you adjust the amount of shortening you’ve plopped in with the addition of buttermilk (buttermilk's preferable as a general rule though milk will do).  You pour in buttermilk, stick your hands in the bowl and start forming a goo by working your fingers in and out of the shortening and buttermilk.  Then you start working flour in from the sides.  This method is truly an art form, because you’re working by feel.  You keep adding buttermilk and working in flour until it “feels” right. 

What does that feel like?  Well, I can’t really tell you, though I can and have made biscuits by this method.  And I know it when I feel it.  You’re working for a proper consistency of dough that isn’t stiff, is still soft, and still feels – well – doughy.  When that consistency is reached, you knead the dough a few times, right there in the center of the bowl.  You know, grabbing each side of the dough ball, pulling it out, folding it back over, flipping the dough, and doing it again from the other side.  But you can’t work it too long or too hard or that’s what you get.  Hard biscuits.  The true connoisseur of this method (and I am not one), completes the process without ever turning the ball of dough out on a counter to knead and roll. 

They merely “pinch” off pieces of dough, shape them into little balls in their palms, slap them down on a greased baking sheet an even distance apart.  When the entire ball has been pinched and shaped and plopped down on the greased baking sheet (and here’s where the even distance apart comes into play), the cook employing this method of biscuit making slaps her hand down on the ball, flattening it into a round circle.  Some cooks prefer using the backs of their fingers.  Once you’ve survived all this, you pop the baking sheet into the middle rack of an oven pre-heated  to 500 degrees for ten minutes. Please note: ten minutes means ten minutes. Do not play around about it. This time and temperature is subject to adjustment as everyone's oven is slightly different.  And for Heaven’s sake, USE A SHINY BAKING SHEET!  A dark one burns the bottoms of the biscuits!

Now.  Here comes the fun part.  That ain’t the only method in town, ladies and gents.  This  second method is generally preferred by those cooks who prefer a “prettier” biscuit.  My mother-in-law used this method and nobody I've ever known or ever will know made better biscuits. It’s basically the first method up until you get to the kneading the dough in the bowl part.  Then it switches over to the “roll and cut” method.  The roll and cut method requires more equipment than the mix and pinch method since it necessitates the use of a rolling pin and biscuit cutters. (See author's personal biscuit making equipment on right. The wooden bowl, by way of further explanation, is handmade, complete with my initials carved into the bottom and was a Christmas gift purchased at a local craft fair many, many years ago. My daughter's already called dibs on same at the time of my demise.)

Cooks who prefer this method (I used to be one till I learned better but more about that later) have a mat of some type, either a wooden block, a plastic dough mat, even a floured kitchen cloth, waiting on the side.  They take the ball of dough as soon as it’s sufficiently formed and dump it onto the waiting – whatever it is they’re using.  Then they knead the dough a few times, sometimes adding a few judicial sprinkles of flour to maintain the proper consistency, and then roll it out on their mat of choice, about half an inch thick or maybe a tad thicker.  You don’t want it any thinner, you’ll have flat biscuits.  And you might as well have used the pinch method which in the hands of an amateur produce some pretty flat biscuits.  Then you cut with a biscuit cutter. I prefer a medium size cutter with a ruffled edge. 

You cut until you can’t cut anymore, mash the dough back into a ball, and start over, repeating the process until all the dough’s gone and you don’t know what the heck to do with the little bit that’s left so you either throw it away or shape it the best you can so it can be the ugly duckling on your baking tray.  The same actual baking methods still apply, 500 degrees for ten minutes on a shiny baking pan, mark and move!

All this sounds real messy, huh?  Well, it is.  And after you’ve done all that, you have to sift the flour that remains in the bowl before you put it back in your flour canister, elsewise, your flour canister will be full of hard little points of shortening that somehow escaped your notice at the time you thought the flour was okay to put back in the canister without sifting but wasn’t.

So why does anybody bother, you ask?  For a long time, I didn’t.  Pillsbury and Betty Crocker and five dozen other companies had come out with frozen biscuits (as opposed to canned biscuits) and you know what?  Those are dang good.  They’re not quite the same as a truly good homemade from scratch biscuit, there's a subtle difference in texture and the way the butter melts into their hot interiors, but for working mothers on the run chasing after teenagers throughout all their extracurricular activities, they're good enough.

Then one day four or five years back, I had a roast slow-roasting in the oven.  And no frozen biscuits in the freezer.  Well, heck.  It’d been years – literally – since I’d made biscuits from scratch, and though I surely wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of so doing, I pulled out the dang flour.  And actually read the recipe on the back.  Two cups of flour, it said.  Quarter cup of shortening.  Two-thirds to three-quarters cup buttermilk or milk.  Cut shortening into flour, add milk, mix and turn onto floured cloth, roll and cut.  Makes a dozen biscuits.

Like heck, I thought.  That ain’t no dozen biscuits.  So I doubled it and actually followed directions, which is something I'm not noted for doing, either in cooking or living life in general.  I’d never seen biscuits made that way, by actually measuring, and considered same to be total heresy because no southern cook ever, ever measured her biscuit making ingredients. But somebody must have done it for there to be a recipe on the flour bag, right?  And you know what?  Those proportions pulled in every bit of the flour from the sides of the bowl.  No excess to have to sift and return to the canister.  And measuring the shortening out with a spoon and cutting it into the flour with a fork kept my hands out of the mess.  Now, it did take just a tad more buttermilk to achieve the texture I remembered, but that wasn’t a problem, and the buttermilk mixed into everything just fine using nothing more than a fork.

I turned the ball of dough out onto my floured board and sprinkled more flour over it.  I kneaded it over a few times and it felt perfect, exactly the “feel” my fingers remembered.  I rolled and cut.  And there’s no way that original recipe would have made a dozen biscuits, not thick ones, anyway.  The doubled recipe only makes fourteen.  But it made fourteen perfect biscuits. 

And so I share with y'all the perfect recipe for the perfect homemade biscuit.  I'm pretty sure it's the recipe in use at the Scales of Justice Cafe in Country Justice and the folks in town really eat those biscuits up! Y'all drop in and see what you think, you hear?

Visit Gail At Books We Love, Ltd.

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You can also drop in at her WebBlog,

Writin' With Southern Stylin'!

Childhood and Education in Early 18th Century England, Rosemary Morris

CLICK TO ORDER ROSEMARY MORRIS BOOKS FROM BOOKS WE LOVE

I have written three romance novels set in the reign of Queen Anne Stuart, 1702-1714.  Tangled Love, Far Beyond Rubies and The Captain and The Countess

Before I began the first chapter of The Captain and The Countess, I became interested in how children were raised and educated in the early 18^th century. My research, included a worthwhile visit to The Foundling Museum at 40, Brunswick Square, London.

Childhood and Education. Boys

                                                       in early 18^th century England.

When Queen Anne Stuart, niece of Charles II, ruled from 1702 to 1714 attitudes towards children and their education were very different to those in the 21^st century.

Only one of Queen Anne’s seventeen children, The Duke of Gloucester, lived for long. His wet-nurse, who breast fed him, probably saved his life, for the fashion was to feed babies with pap. This food was preferred by mothers too afraid of losing their figures to suckle their infants.

The unfortunate little duke suffered from water on the brain. He found it difficult to walk and go up and down stairs without help. To cure him, the queen and his father, Prince George of Denmark, shut themselves in a room with him. George thrashed him so cruelly with a birch rod that from then on the child managed to ascend and descend stairs unaided.

Fussed over by ladies at court, and with boisterous children to play with, he drilled his company of boy soldiers. He reviewed them on his eleventh birthday, after which he became ill with scarlet fever that caused his death.

Few details are known about the lives of poor, illiterate children, who probably followed in their parents’ footsteps if they did not take advantage of charity schools. Boys whose families could afford the fees became apprentices and learned a trade, but not all of them were well-treated. Neither were the homeless waifs on the streets who begged for food and money.

The Duke of Gloucester was beaten, but what were children’s lives in well-to-do families like?

As it has been remarked, ‘they did things differently in those days’. New-born babies’ heads were bound, they were swaddled and given an elixir, that in the days when people were ignorant about hygiene might have added to infant mortality.

Relatives and friends came every day to admire the infant. Henri Misson, an entertaining French traveller, whose book was published in 1719, observed that babies were baptised soon after birth. After the ceremony, wine and a special cake, only made for christenings, was served. Papers of sweetmeats were given to the parson, for his wife and children, and to the female visitors before they left.

In an age of impure water, poor sanitation, smallpox and other diseases, infants were vulnerable. Nurses dosed fretful infants with ‘DUFFY’S FAMOUS ELIXIR SALUTIS’. It was advertised as ‘The Finest Exposed to Sale Prepared from the Best Drugges’, and available from the Hand and Pen in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, and many other places in town and country.

Dr John Pechy studied infants’ and children’s diseases. His cough mixture included horehound, liquorice, hyssop and other ingredients including powdered woodlice. There were medicines for worms and rickets. Teething was supposedly soothed with black cherry water mixed with three or four drops of Spirits of Hartshorn.

Desperate parents must have believed a necklace, which could be hired from Mr Larance’s in Somerset House near Northumberland House in the Strand, could cure fits in children caused by teeth or any other cause.

Probably, children in well-to-do families were brought up in the nursery, and by their mothers, until they were old enough to go to school.

Coral rattles with bells amused infants. Little is known about boys’ toys but they had cardboard windmills attached to sticks, and, possibly rocking horses.

Children had their own books such as ‘A Play Book for Children’ to interest them as soon as they could speak clearly. The pages were small but easy to read. The book cost four pence and must have been popular because the second edition was published in 1703.

Children learned the alphabet, both the lower and upper cases and the Lord’s Prayer from hornbooks, which consisted of a small sheet of paper, 4 inches by three inches laid on a flat piece of board with a handle. This was covered by a thin plate of horn fastened to the board.

Young boys didn’t sit exams and learn foreign languages. The advice given to The Mother in Steele’s Lady’s Library, if carried out should have ensured their children would grow up to be good men and women.

Boys enjoyed stories such as ‘Jack and the Giants’ etc., Aesop’s fables, Guy of Warwick and St George of England.

For older boys, tuition was available, and day schools and boarding schools existed. Young gentlemen learned English, French, Greek, Latin, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography etc. Although French, High Dutch and Italian were taught, it was the Classical Age and every gentleman was expected to be a good classical scholar.

In Queen Anne’s reign there were many free schools and charity schools. In 1713 at a public thanksgiving for peace, after the French were defeated in The War of Spanish Succession, the charity children sat in tiered seats from which they could see the queen go to St Paul’s Cathedral.

When I wrote The Captain and The Countess I drew on my research, and enjoyed writing about my imaginary Foundling Home based on fact.

* * *

https;//www.amazon.co.uk/The-Captain-And-The-Countess/ebook/dp/B01FCENLKE                                                                                   

https;//www.amazon.com/The-Captain-And-The-Countess /ebook/dp/B01FCENLKE

Early 18^th century novels by Rosemary Morris

Tangled Love,

Far Beyond Rubies 

Regency novels

False Pretences

Sunday’s Child   Heroines born on different days of the week. Book 1.

Monday’s Child Heroines born on different days of the week. Book 2

Tuesday’s Child Heroines born on different days of the week Book 3

www.rosemarymorris.co.uk

Palace of Whitehall, Part II by Katherine Pym

For more about Katherine Pym's books and to purchase visit her Books We Love author page

 
Previously, I told you the history of Whitehall Palace, its beginnings and its end. Today, I want to talk of the structure, and how London’s activities affected Whitehall Palace. 

Whitehall Palace

Part II, Other stuff about Whitehall:

Castles have a tendency to be drafty, and it was no different with the Palace of Whitehall. Due to the compilation of various buildings crammed together, the palace was more drafty than normal. During storms, winds whistled down chimneys and spread ash across the chambers. Fires sparked, then smoldered.   

London and its suburbs used sea coal and brown coal to heat their homes. It was inferior and smoked. London also seemed to have existed under a pall of inversion. Smoke and pollution hung stagnant over the city and its suburbs for weeks on end.

Coal was used to brew ale or beer. Dyers used coal to heat water. Soap boilers manufactured their product with ash. Glass houses, founders and most industries used coal for their fires and their products. As a result, smoke settled heavy on everything with a gritty dust. Not a good place for asthmatics, the air was hard to breathe.

John Evelyn (1620-1706) loved London. He observed everything within and without the great city. 

In 1661, he wrote Fumifugium: or, The Inconvenience of the AER, and SMOAKE of London Dissipate, a diatribe of the damages smoke can do to a person, city, and anything alive. In this pamphlet, he also proposed remedies for this damage. This, he gave to King Charles II in the year of his coronation (1661).

A visit to Whitehall provoked Evelyn to write this pamphlet. While he strolled through the palace, looking for a glimpse of His Royal Majesty, Evelyn said, “a presumptuous smoke issuing from one or two tunnels near Northumberland House, and not far from Scotland Yard, did so invade the Court that all the rooms, galleries, and places about it were filled and infested with it, and that to such a degree, as men could hardly discern one another for the cloud...”

Apparently, the smoke was so thick in the palace, people had to stretch their arms to make it from room to room. I can imagine with the uneven floors, bridges, and stairways that linked strange floor levels, this could be dangerous.

Evelyn continues, “...upon frequent observation, but it was this alone, and the trouble that it must needs procure to Your Sacred Majesty, as well as hazard to your health…” Yes, wandering a palace so filled with smoke, it would be difficult to breathe, to see without your eyes tearing.

In 1662 a strong storm hit London, and Whitehall was not spared. A few fires started but fortunately, they were doused without any real damage. After this, regulations were enforced to have at each hearth a leather bucket filled with water.

In 1691, Whitehall nearly burned down. By this time, it was a maze of complexity, and the largest palace in Europe. On April 10^th of this year, a fire broke out that damaged a great deal of the structure(s), but not the State Apartments. By this time, William III and Mary II lived most of the time in Kensington Palace.

Then, in 1698 what remained of Whitehall burned, along with many treasures garnered over the ages. Among other treasures, scholars believe Michelangelo’s Cupid, the Portrait of Henry VIII, and Bernini’s marble bust of King Charles I were all lost.

John Evelyn wrote: “Whitehall burnt! Nothing but walls and ruins left.”

Can you imagine the stories those old walls could have told, so rich, historical, and often tragic.

Sources:

Adrian Tinniswood. By Permission of Heaven, The true Story of the Great Fire of London. Riverhead Books, NY, 2003

John Evelyn. Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the AER, and SMOAKE of London Dissipated. Together With some Remedies humbly proposed by J.E. Esq; To His Sacred MAJESTIE, and To the Parliament now Assemble. Published by His Majesties Command. London 1661

http://www.hrp.org.uk/learninganddiscovery/Discoverthehistoricroyalpalaces/thebuildinghistories/BanquetingHouse/WhitehallPalace

Happy Halloween in February...

Yes, you read that right.

My dad called me February 13 to wish me and early Happy Halloween.
We both had a good laugh. Nearly twenty-five years ago, my dad underwent brain surgery to help control his epileptic seizures. While he hasn't had seizures since, he has had to relearn a lot of things he'd forgotten after doctors removed a quarter-sized piece of his brain. He's had a long journey.

I've always taken for granted the ability to read, to write, to think in the way I always have. I knew the things my dad had to re-learn. How to talk, how to write, how to name the every day objects we all "just know" because we've learned from the time we were little. In the blink of a ten hour surgery, my dad forgot a lot of those things. The names of his wife, his kids, his pets, even the names of holidays all these years later. His brain just didn't make the connection any more.

As writers, we all learn new things with every book we write. We forge new pathways in our brains and test our own memories as well as our sanity. I've learned some new things and had new experiences mostly out of my own interest which I've then transformed into new story ideas.

When I moved to a small town, I began to explore and use the scenery around me to create a mystery series about Katie Mullins who moved to a small town to hide out and ended up creating a whole new life. While I didn't get to work in a bookstore, I sure do haunt a lot of them!

As a karate student, I began to write a martial arts mystery series and my latest work in progress, is about a woman who ends up running a tea shop. All the things I write about in that book, I've partly learned in my brief stint working in a local Tim Hortons coffee shop. Now that I'm working at a haunted theatre... The sky is the limit. The things I learn go into books and the things I write become things I want to learn. It's all give and take.

As for my dad, even after the surgery and a lengthy recovery, he's now a singer/songwriter.
He used to be a lumberjack.

At a local coffee house with my dad and one of our CDs.

To be honest, we didn't always get along. We went for a long time gone without speaking to each other. Once we reconnected, I've been fortunate to work with him writing lyrics and have heard my words come to life on his numerous CDs.

As for Halloween in February, I figure next year I'll send him a package of pumpkin seeds for Valentine's Day next year.

Diane Bator

Check out my books here.

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