[Vwoolf] Muffins

Sun Sep 22 15:38:34 EDT 2019

You are making me hungry!

Vara

Vara Neverow
Department of English
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu

________________________________
From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 2:16 PM
To: Mary Ellen Foley <mefoleyuk at gmail.com>
Cc: vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Muffins

My sister reminds me that our family had two toasting forks: one the posh telescopic one, and one that was part of a set of "fire irons": poker, scissor-like pincer implement to grab lumps of coal, shovel to deal with ashes, and a toasting fork. There was a fear that if you used to toasting fork in front of an electric fire then you might electrocute yourself. At any rate ours disappeared when my parents moved into a house without an open fire. The pincer implement could also be used for roasting chestnuts.

My reading of the "Peanuts" strip suggests that in the US marshmallows are toasted using a simple stick. Correct?

Sorry about "heap": "neatly stacked pile" is what I meant to write.

Jeremy

On 22.09.2019 20:01, Mary Ellen Foley wrote:
I've got a recipe that calls for toasting the crumpets individually, stacking them up, and putting "a lump of butter" on top so that it melts down and butters all the crumpets. The book was given to me in 1982, and was contemporary (and published by SuperCook's; British readers may recognize the brand).

I certainly can't imagine crumpets being eaten like American pancakes, which suggests a knife and fork.  And if a stack of American pancakes is a 'heap', then 'heap' is used differently in the two countries!

I was disillusioned when I moved to the UK to find that a lump of sugar was just a common cube of sugar, but I still like it that recipes use terms such as lump. I have old recipes from my foremothers that call for "a lump of butter the size of a walnut" or "of a hen's egg". I wonder if any British cookbooks still calls for a knob of butter?  Perhaps only if preparing spotted dick --

mef

On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 3:16 PM Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:

Rereading The Waves and came across this: "Yes, I hold Gray's Elegy in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet, that has absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate." This suggests that Bernard and Neville are eating crumpets as Americans eat pancakes - already toasted and buttered or whatever, and piled in heaps. In contrast, my childhood memory is of toasting them in front of an open fire, then buttering them individually and eating them while the butter was only half melted. Much nicer that way. The toasting method is as described below in "Counsel's Opinion," but as the clerk is doing the toasting and leaving them keeping hot in the library, presumably they too will be buttered en masse and eaten from a greasy pile. Do families still possess toasting forks? I suspect that with the demise of the open coal fire, they exist only in Antique shops. My family had a rather fine telescopic one - fully extended you could toast without getting burnt by the fire.

Jeremy H

On 20.0.2019 10:34, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf wrote:
I ‘as bin readin’ “Counsel’s Opinion”, Bella Sidney Woolf’s jointly-written privately published one-act play of 1922, presumably written for am.dram. performances of and for expats in Honkers.  Can that be so?  It was printed in HK, but Bella was still in Colombo; she only moved to HK in 1925.  So, perhaps it was intended for expats in Colombo, and it is a coincidence that her husband Tom Southorn’s career took him from Colombo to HK.

Anyway, the play is set in “A room in the Temple”, belonging to a “Lady Barrister”.  That’s progressive, and even more progressive is that her love interest (another barrister) finally accepts that he “was old-fashioned enough to think that men must work and women must housekeep”.

However, she has a clerk, Jenkins, who is also female: “As the curtain rises, JENKINS, a quaint person in a black frock is toasting muffins in front of the fire.  She is singing ‘. . .’ [censored, in case the sensitives are caused distress]”.  Jenkins and references to muffins continue throughout the play.  The muffins and the dropped aitches (e.g. “D’yer like yer muffins ‘alf-toasted or done to a coal-black cinder?”) reminds me of “Orlando”: “The muffins is keepin’ ’ot in the liberry”.

As part of the US imperial project, American muffins have invaded the UK and are gradually taking over.  They are advertised as muffins, as if English muffins didn’t exist.  American muffins are the teatime equivalent of the grey [sic] squirrel.

It is a sobering thought that generations of Americans have not known what muffins were in “Orlando”.  Some may have wondered why they needed to be kept ‘ot, or why one should apply butter to them (see “The Importance of Being Earnest”).

The new CUP edn of “Orlando” provides info. on the history of the muffin (and the crumpet) under the quote “The muffin was invented and the crumpet”, but does not explain what a muffin actually is.  Of course, you can look up a dictionary, but sometimes you don’t know that you *need* to look up a dictionary.  Cf. “street scavengers” in “Jacob’s Room”.

Stuart

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