Author: eljanik

Dead People’s Houses

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I love to haunt the homes of the dead, especially those of the famous and notable. Now before you think me profane, let me explain.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved visiting historic homes. Family vacations always involved at least one stop at a house museum and more likely, several. I can honestly say I’ve been in hundreds of historic homes, from General Ulysses S. Grant’s house in Galena, Illinois, and Rutherford B. Hayes’s home in Fremont, Ohio, to the homes of Susan B. Anthony, Harry Truman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and lesser figures who just happened to have beautiful old homes in states across the country. I thrilled at walking the same floors as President James Monroe, and tried to imagine the lives of the people who lived in these spaces decades and even centuries ago. It made history seem real and tangible (it’s the historic corollary to celebrity magazines that show celebrities doing normal things like grocery shopping. Thomas Jefferson sleeps in a bed, just like me!) and is probably largely responsible for my love of history today.

Cut to a few years ago when I met my now husband. “You want to visit a dead person’s house for what reason?” he asked. “You know they’re dead, right?”

The question left me speechless. “Of course I know that,” I snapped. “But aren’t you curious how they lived? Where they lived? Some of these homes are just so beautiful.”

He still hasn’t come around to my view. But he’s happy to come along and wait outside while I continue my tour of the homes of dead people in American history.

Mark Twain's house in Hartford, CT - the latest stop on my tour of dead people's homes

 

 

Apples on the Radio

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Apples are on the minds of the folks at the public radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge” where I recently spoke with Anne Strainchamps about the history of apples.

Check out the story of the Rambo apple on “Wisconsin Life,” too.

Ghosts of my Ancestors

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Growing up, I never knew much about my family or its history. Family trees for school projects were always hasty, improvised affairs that rarely extended beyond my grandparents no matter how much I badgered my parents for information. Somehow, it never seemed strange at the time that my parents sometimes couldn’t even tell me the names of my great-grandparents – their own grandparents! I knew immigration was somehow involved but I wasn’t sure of the countries or even when it happened.

Last weekend I walked the streets of Bolan, Iowa, my great-grandfather’s birthplace for the first time. The town is a single street set amidst fields of corn rich with stands of electricity-generating windmills. It’s a small town – currently a population of 9 – and probably always has been. My great-great-grandparents came to Bolan from Sweden, Scandinavians drawn to the Midwest like so many before them.

I never met my great-grandfather but visiting his town made me feel like I had. The street, buildings, and landscape made this long unknown part of my history tangible, more real than I ever thought possible. Bolan was somehow my hometown, too.

It’s a funny thing for someone like me who writes about history and cares deeply about the past to know so little of my own story. There’s a deep connection that comes from understanding history and the forces that shaped a time and a place. It’s a feeling that once found is hard to shake. When I talk to people about history and why it matters, I often say that you can’t know where you are until you know where you’ve been.

I’m just now figuring out where I’ve been.

Probably the cutest museum ever

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimate Hitchhikers

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Last week, I had the great honor of having my apple book excerpted on Salon.com. They took a portion of the first chapter, which explores how apples made it from Kazakhstan to your backyard (or somewhere near it at least). It’s a pretty neat trick.

Apples are perhaps the world’s greatest hitchhikers, seducing you to pull over with a flash of their sweet and delicious flesh. They stole a ride in your bag or rode along in the stomach of your horse, traveling dozens of miles by dint of their captivating taste and aroma.

They don’t just travel well.  Apples also tend to make themselves at home almost anywhere, insinuating themselves into the local culture and never leaving. It’s why we think of apples as very American fruit despite their origins in a place about as far away as you can imagine.

Apples produce offspring that can vary quite dramatically from their parents. Each seed contains the genetic material for a whole other kind of apple that can taste and look radically different than the parent fruit. Every apple has several seeds and every tree has hundreds of apples so one of these seeds is bound to have the street smarts to survive in their new home.

Thankfully for us and the fruit, apples taste pretty good so we don’t mind that they tend to stick around uninvited.

Apples for Health

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A new study in the journal Stroke asks if “an apple a day keeps stroke away?” The study authors say yes. It turns out that the old 1904 apple industry marketing campaign to rebrand apples as healthful may be more true than J.T. Stinson knew when he coined the now famous adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” The consumption of apples (as well as pears) appears to lower your risk of stroke more than any other fruit and vegetable, leading the editorial writer to suggest that perhaps there will finally be an “apple a day” clinical trial.

I guess Eve knew was on to something when she grabbed that apple.

Throwing Stones

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On Monday night, I went curling for the first time. Too concerned about falling and knocking myself out on the ice (a very real possibility), I didn’t manage to get any photos of the event. But that’s probably a good thing – it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.

Curling has a long history in Wisconsin. In fact, the oldest continuously operating curling club in the country is in Milwaukee where they’ve been curling since 1846. Wisconsinites curled on rivers and lakes, anywhere they could find some solid ice to throw stones. While curling is solidly associated with Scotland, it may have actually originated in the Netherlands. Paintings from the mid-14th century show Dutch curlers. The game soon traveled to Scotland, though, where it became a national pastime. Scottish immigrants brought their love of the game with them to North America.

Americans often curled with wooden stones because wood was accessible and affordable. These stones varied in size, shape, and weight. A movement to standardize the game didn’t come until the 20th century.

Curling is a surprisingly challenging sport: something I hadn’t quite appreciated while watching it on TV during the Olympics. A slider fits on over your left shoe (if you’re right handed like me, that is) while your right foot slides back into a “hack” that’s kind of like the starting posts on a track. The basic movement is a long, low lunge with your left knee bent up and your right trailing behind as you push yourself forward on the ice, attempting to simultaneously aim your stone and not kill yourself. It’s a thigh burner and a real balancing act. Sweeping is a lot of fun, though, also requires serious coordination as you run down the ice alongside the stone sweeping, sweeping, sweeping fast and hard.

I left the curling open house with a new appreciation of this centuries old sport. I was also reminded of this charming booklet, the Annual of the Grand National Curling Club of America, 1880, detailing the matches of the 1878 – 1879 curling season that I’d run across years ago at the Wisconsin Historical Society. There’s much talk of “hardy men” braving the harsh winter weather to curl and the sumptuous meals served afterward to renew their strength.

Cider for Dinner

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If you think all hard ciders are the same, it’s time to start drinking. Cider (assume I mean hard when I say it) exists in as infinite number of varieties as there are apples in the world. And that’s not even mentioning the countless ways the juice of apples can be distilled and fermented. Technique and ingredients, like in all foods, really matters.

I recently went to a cider and cheese dinner at Graze.  Each course was paired with a cider from Wisconsin’s AeppelTreow. We had everything from a sparkling perry to start, to a draft cider and a berry – apple cider mix for dessert. Each was uniquely different and complimented our meal perfectly.

Dessert course with matched cider

Cider is often made from cider apples – apples specially suited to making cider just as some apples are best for baking. These aren’t the types of apples you find in the grocery store. And that’s probably a good thing since they can be high in tannins and acids that make them rather unpalatable to eat out of hand. But they are perfect for cider.

Most cider is made from a combination of apples expertly blended to yield a balanced mix of sugars, acids, and tannins. Tannins gives the cider its color; the more tannin, the deeper the golden brown. It also gives cider its dryness, the same dryness often found in red wines. The wrong blend of these elements can result an undrinkable cider. While most cider contains a blend of apple varieties, there’s one apple that is often sold as a single varietal: Kingston Black. It’s said to be the rare, perfectly balanced cider apple.

Cider tends to reflect the country of its origin. French ciders, for instance, tend to be light and bubbly like another French specialty, champagne. Local tastes become integral to the cider making process and the cider that is produced.

As much as I love cider, my favorite cider of the night was actually not an apple cider at all – it was the perry, or pear cider. In Europe, cidermakers traditionally made ciders from both apples and pears. This hasn’t been as true in the United States, where cider and perry tend to come from separate makers.  But as cider becomes more popular, I’m holding out hope that pears and apples will be united in alcoholic glory again.

 

 

 

 

 

Lutefisk Season

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LutefiskFall is lutefisk time in the Midwest. Lutefisk is dried cod that has been rehydrated in a lye solution and then boiled or baked. The finished fish, served with butter, salt, and pepper, has the consistency and jiggly-ness of Jell-O. Needless to say, it’s an acquired taste.

Every fall, churches throughout the Upper Midwest hold special lutefisk dinners where Norwegian – Americans (though not exclusively – these dinners attract a wide fan base) get in touch with their heritage. In some families, lutefisk even takes the place of the holiday turkey. Fortunately, most of these dinners also include meatballs, mashed potatoes, lefse (the best part if you ask me), and salad for the lutefisk averse.

Norwegians probably didn’t invent lutefisk but they certainly have a long history of making and eating it. Various stories and legends tell of Vikings Salting and drying fish was an efficient way to preserve food, and many Scandinavians brought their lutefisk with them to America when they emigrated.

Today, nostalgia plays a big role in the annual lutefisk dinner. More lutefisk is probably eaten in Wisconsin and Minnesota than in Scandinavia where most people have moved on from the gelatinous fish. But it plays an important role in Midwestern culture, both as an emblem and connection to a past shared by many of this region’s first European immigrants and as a social and community event.

I know I’ll be there.

Apple Cures

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Thomson's Home Healing Guide

American physician Samuel Thomson was a big fan of apples. The founder of his own 19th century medical system, a method of natural, botanic remedies known as Thomsonianism, Thomson prescribed apples for stomach aches and advised mixing emetics with cider for those who needed a little something sweet to help the medicine go down. His medical journal, the Thomsonian Recorder, included articles on planting and tending apple orchards. For cholera, though, apples should be avoided at all costs warned Thomson.

Apples have long played a role in medicine. Even when people wouldn’t eat the raw fruit, they were more than willing rub some apple pulp on their skin or to swallow a tincture containing apples. Apples were prescribed for disturbances of the bowels, lungs, and nervous systems in 12th century Italy. In the 14th century, apple cures often called for apples cooked with sugar and spice, a kind of medical apple pie. Seventeenth century English doctors advised cider for depression, though it may have been the alcohol rather than the healing power of apples that did the cheering.

Thomson likely championed apples because they were natural, not to mention easily accessible to most Americans. Nearly everyone had an orchard in the yard. They also had a long history in medicine. Thomson’s ideas of the healing power of plants and herbs weren’t necessarily new – but he managed to capitalize them so successfully as to present the first serious challenge to regular medicine in the 19th century.

An October Fruit Surprise

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Living in Wisconsin, you resign yourself to eating from the small stream of local fruit. Apples, sure. Pears? Check. We have berries – strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries – but the season is short and they are often expensive and available in limited supply at the farmers market. There’s a few others (and many wild fruits for foraging if you know where and when to look) but let’s face it: we aren’t Michigan.

So it was a pleasant surprise to run across bags overflowing with Wisconsin peaches at the farmers market this last weekend. Not only peaches but peaches in October, a month that I tend to associate with the emergence of hardy greens, cabbages, potatoes, beets, and squash. I eagerly bought a sack – and may have elbowed a few people aside in my hurry and delight (sorry, folks) – and rushed back home to dig in.

While I often think of peaches reaching their apogee in southern climates, peaches and apples actually have similar life stories. Peaches are believed to have originated in north China, not all that far from the mountains of Kazakhstan that birthed apple trees. They traveled east, west, north, and south with people and animals. The Romans learned about peaches from the Greeks who had learned about them from the Persians who had first introduced them to the West. In conquering Persia, Alexander the Great took many things from the Persians but one of the most valuable was their love and knowledge of fruit, including apples and peaches.

The Romans even called them “Persian Apples” for the Persians who loved them and likely “apples” for their round shape (many round fruits and vegetables have been called “apples” at some point, from cherries and avocados to eggplant). The Spanish fell particularly hard for the peach and brought it to the Americas, where Native Americans are widely credited with spreading peaches across the continents… and even to Wisconsin, I suppose.