Bubble, bubble, finale

So this evening I finally got to cook in the darn things. Miss D came over to get accustomed to her fancy new jet-powered cookstove for her trip down (that thing is awesome! Tea in under a minute - criminy!), while I got the fire back up for a nice bed of coals to set the cauldrons to honest use for the first time.


Honestly, my big 'outdoorsy' weak spot has always been firebuilding. I've long been able to walk out of the woods with anything from berry baskets to twine to a bowstave, but at fire, I have sucked. My early unschooled attempts were cold wet miserable failures, and after that I tended to be in groups where I could let the more experienced folk take care of such matters. I know, I know.. unwise.

So anyhow, one of my ulterior motives with the cauldrons was to get halfway competent at making a cookfire. And today went a lot better.

I started with flint and steel - and charcloth, of course. I was out of the jute twine I normally made the birds nest from, so I used a mess of pulled linen threads left over from one sewing project or another, and some dried corn husk. The linen was a little slow to catch, but it worked out just fine. I think the best lesson so far was the "a-ha" moment seeing a youTube video about Roger's Rangers linked off of Woodsrunner's blog*.

The gentleman had used tinder cut as shavings, as if planed from the wood, rather than twigs and sticks and suchlike. Between that and just intently watching the fire do its firey thing the last night or two, the whole "oh.... very high surface area to volume ratio. That makes sense..." lightbulb came on. I know, I can be slow sometimes. But I'm hoping that if I can learn to do it this way, if I ever have to do it for real with all the modern conveniences it'll be easy. Besides, it's fun. :)

The cauldrons themselves work right well - that much iron for cooking in really teaches you to appreciate the whole "thermal mass" concept. I think at some point soon I need to hacksaw off the bale though and get one of my blacksmith friends to make me a nice hinged pot holder. The fixed bale just gets in the way sitting on the coals, and it's a pain fishing for it to move the pot. Some of the "ice tong" style holders used once upon a time would probably work better. And I need to make or have made a decent lid. A cutting board can suffice for a while, but still.

Finally, the sausage dish came out... enh. Not as fantabulous as I remembered, but not bad either. It'll come. The biggest trouble was that I'd always before drained the sausage grease from the skillet when I was cooking it on the stovetop. I neglected this this time, when the food was sitting at the bottom of a heavy, troublesome to move hot iron pot. Hrmm. I think I'm starting to see why so much of traditional British food is boiled. So one more thing to figure out.

So far, so good though. I'm thinking I need to make a date with myself - at least until the snow starts flying - to do this at least once a week and get better all around.

Can't stop learning somethin,' after all. Time to go find some recipes to try. This is fun... :)






*speaking of, if you're at all interested in the lives of our ancestors, he's amazing to read. An Aussie who's been studying and woods talking the old school way for decades. Highly, highly recommended! Can we adopt him? :)

Why Alaska is cool, RE. #392

You know, there are few things more... Firefly than living in Alaska. The way old frontier era technology exists side by side with high tech stuff is just continually amusing. It's much more apparent in the bush, but even in town you can get fun little reminders every now and again.


For instance... imagine yourself outside at the wood stump, cutting up kindling for the evening's fire. Then you hear a roar, look up, and see nine high performance aerobatic jets* flying a complex maneuver maybe a few hundred yards over your head.

This place just rocks. :)



* ah - a bit of googling shows they were the Snowbirds, a Canadian Forces demo team.
Right precise they are, to.

The Blue Angels were out practicing the other day to.. gonna have to go out to the air show tomorrow to see 'em proper.

Seasoning a Jas Townsend Cast Iron Cauldron

(or... "things I learned today, Part II")

Now *this* has been a nice relaxing evening. I started a little fire, to give the cauldrons a nice old-timey seasoning.






So... it's been an educational time.

1. When planing to cook (season) on the coals, think "stick" not "log" when splitting the wood. I apologize to you boyscouts for whom that's basic knowledge, but some of my education was sorely neglected growing up. (Incidentally, the big ol' WSK knife does a dandy job splitting the wood, but I'm thinking if I'm going to keep doing this, I need a proper hatchet. Actually, I think next tine I visit home, I'll just commission a nice Tennessee frontier era tomahawk and use that. Aside from the whole family heritage thing, anything that can both do a useful job *and* make a nice historic romantic wall decoration gets bonus points. Plus, it's good for splitting open Loyalist tyrants. :)

2. I'm pretty good at getting the ember from flint and steel, but need to work on that transition between "little smoking birds nest" and "useful fire." I ended up cheating with a tea light. But hey, I got fire. That's what counts, right?

3. The "smooth river rock" idea for smoothing the inside worked delightfully well. So long as there's no sharp edges to gouge the metal, it works great for knocking down the high spots and smoothing over the mold line. I basically just slathered in a great big handful of bacon grease and went to town with the stone. Worked like a charm. HOWEVER... either wear hearing protection, or at least make certain to point the opening of the cauldron away from you. For some strange reason, great big cast metal bowls get remarkably loud. :) It's not exactly bell like, but there is shall we say a family resemblance.

4. Doing it outside over a fire is a nice, nice way to spend a relaxing evening. Beats the heck out of turning off the alarms and filling the house with smoke from the oven.

5. Birch bark makes wonderful tinder, all nice and resin-y.

5. Next time, make the fire big enough to do 'em both at once.



And that, I think, is that. I figure I'll stir up the fire tomorrow and give 'em one more good heat-and-grease session - assuming it's not raining again tomorrow - and call 'em done. It's taken a few evenings work, but they're finally starting to look like real live cooking tools, not vaguely cauldron-shaped iron monstrosities.


Soon there shall be woodsmoke-tinged sausagey appley goodness. :)

The Price

Anchorage is very much a military town. Head north and you pass first the air force base, then the army base. Keep your eyes open about town, and every trip to the grocery store and you'll see men and women in ACUs... most often of the young and deploying variety.

Further, the sky on the north side of town and over the point is filled with Air Force craft. Every day, they're running AWACs, hauling cargo to and from, and practicing skills with those engineered marvels of aircraft that will simply take your breath away to see them. They make it look so clean, so effortless, that sometimes it's hard to remember they really are just that good at what they do - and what they do is by definition a hazardous occupation.

Like yesterday.


The folks up at Elmendorf are a simply amazing crew.
If you're the praying sort, kindly spare a moment for them today.


:(

Bubble, bubble...

One of the things I'd always wanted to learn, but hadn't take much time for yet, was real old-time cooking over woodfire. I know, I'm no foodie - I doubt I'll ever put in the work to be able to work magic like Miss D or Brigid. Still, a little now and again is fun. Especially done the old school way.

I'd done a little hearthside once upon a time, but never enough to feel even vaguely competent, so I finally plunked down the money for the pots to get started.

Pre-seasoning, the casting is.... rough, shall we say. They're certainly functional, but hardly at the Lodge level of cast iron, much less the nice stuff. Some small voids in in the lip of the larger one, and an actual pokey-bit inside the smaller one from the mold line. On the other hand, they feel so much more archetypal than an African potjie, and I expect will clean up fairly well.

I did the first round of seasoning last night following Miss C's regimen of "sand, then boil onions in 'em to open up the metal, then season with fat."

It's helped... but they ain't skillets. I think next step is going to be to just find a smooth stone to dress down the rougher spots inside, and then set 'em in the fire with seasoning yet a few more times. They'll get there.

All the practical stuff out of the way .., there is something visceral about some old things, those parts of onceaday life that were once so universal and archetypal that they've buried themselves into our minds years before we ever touch them with fingers.... the Gaelic harp, the American longrifle - I'm sure there's a host of such things.

Rubbing more grease into the round belly of a cauldron as it comes out of the oven all warm and slick, I can't not be overwhelmed with imagery of pregnant potentiality, of sustenance-giving, of life. Its little belly is already bubbling over with myth.

This is gonna be fun. :)



And oh..oh dear. I'm afraid I had to fry a couple pounds of bacon to make sure I had enough lard for all that iron to drink up. Whatever, ever shall I do? :)

Followups....

My favorite farmlady asks, in reference to the bit from Albion's Seed -

so how does he explain the hospitality we're also famous for? Methinks he doesn't really get hillbillies.

Also, James makes a funny about the airplane dome. :)

Second question first, since it's easier. Nope... learned it from one of the pilots at the Palmer Air Show where the plane was one display. Seems the craft in question was used by the USMC just after the Korean War (this particular one was built after the war ended, but the pattern had been in use for a while, he said). In the 80's it was purchased out of a government boneyard and flown up to Alaska to haul fish and cargo. Something happened I neglected to get more details about, the outfit folded, and it sat again. And now it's being restored once again.

But anyhow - we got to go inside and talk with one of the gentlemen who used to fly it, and he pointed it out. Later conversation with a former military man and A&P up here confirmed the practice - he also said it was done on Russian a/c at least into the 80's.

The fascinating thing about Alaskan aviation is how spread in time it is.. there are still planes from the 40's and 50's being constantly maintained and kept up in daily use. Even in Anchorage, rare is the day you don't see rag-and-tube covered cubs and big round-nosed Beavers buzzing around the sky. At the same time, the college is flying sleek little trainers out of Austria (Diamond Katanas, last I looked), and the Air Force Raptors chase each other over the bay. There are times it truly feels like living in a museum exhibit.



Now, first question second, since the answer's a little more involved.


I'll have an answer from Dr. Fischer's perspective when I'm done with that monster book. :)

I think Senator Webb of Born Fighting would answer that by saying it's due to the "Celtic connection." Certainly, the obligations of hospitality go far back into time in the Celtic world, and are codified fairly explicitly in native* Gaelic Irish Brehon Law.

That said, one of the gaps I'm still puzzling through is the origins of the Scots borderers that would eventually become the Scotch-Irish we know today. I *think* the answer is most likely "descended largely from Dal Riatic Irish, and a lesser mix of Pict, Norse, and whoever else was in Scotland in the early parts of the first millennium" - then largely dominated by (but not necessarily interbred with on a great scale) - Anglo-Norman feudal overlords. I say "puzzling" because I so far haven't found an authoritative source that goes into the history of the people prior to about 1300, so it's still murky prior to the border war period. I'm sure it's out there, I simply don't know about it yet. One of the joys - and challenges - in this time is sorting through the sheer volume of information out there.

Whatever happened though, there was enough Anglo influence for lowland Scots language to be effectively a pidgeon English dialect. All of which is the long way of saying I'm unconvinced that looking to Gaelic tradition is necessarily a good way of coming to answers here. Assuming the above half-educated hypothesis is true, there's every chance Brehon notions would have come down through the generations without their legal structure from the Dal Riata Irish .. but I can't say for sure, and I'm cautious about being overly romantic.

More on that in another post sometime.

In the modern era (say white settlement of the 1700's through the cultural homogenization of the mid 20th-c) - I think the answer is much simpler... when you live on a frontier, you have to treat your neighbors good.

That part's informed by living up in Alaska, and a couple months in the bush getting stories from my generous host/employers there. The line to any centralized authority is so long, the supply line so slow.. that there simply is no "send them to a hotel" option. And in some parts of the year, you kick them out and they could die. In addition, the community - while broadly spread out - is relatively small in population, and most of your neighbors probably know you by name. Your actions - good and bad - will get out. So it's in one's best interest to be good to your neighbors and strangers passing through, for that will shape the community in which one must live.

I'll also add to that those I've known who went truly above and beyond were consciously heavily motivated by Biblical injunctions to "Love thy neighbor" and "be a cheerful giver." That's not to say one has to be a devout Christian to be a good host - far, far from it, and it's certainly drawing from a limited sample even up here - but I'd be doing a severe disservice to those I have known here if I said I'd not noticed a difference.














-----------
* for certain values of "native," just as when we're talking "native American" - but we know what we mean when we say it, so...

A wise old owl sat in an oak...

ADDENDUM... Miss D offers the one thing I learned yesterday that was not so fun to learn... the passing of F Atlee Dodge.

If you've seen pictures of an Alaskan Super Cub, you've seen his work. His mark is stamped in steel and aluminum all across the state... and is a large part of what turned a lower-48 trainer into the workhorse of wilderness guides, game-getters, and outdoorsmen.

To the extent there are modern longhunters or mountain men... this is their mount. And it's largely because of this man it is what it is.

Thank you, sir.




========


You know, some times I'm just amazed at what you can pick up just shutting up and listening to experienced people talk about what they love, and watching them do what they do.

For instance, today I learned...

... that as late as the Korean War, the US was fielding an aircraft with a dome in the cockpit for celestial navigation. That's just cool.

... that at least one light sport has CG concerns not only forward/aft, but left/right.

... that the local FAA folk don't like using DUAT - that bit's from a safety lecture that mostly went in one ear and out the other, excepting that the new(ish) ELT frequency is scads more reliable, and the little portable GPS beacons are not an unwise investment.

... that at some point in the transition from wood cook ranges, it was not uncommon to convert them to use oil.

.. That indoor heating stoves of the '30's came in this frankly quite pretty pseudo-woodgrain stamped metal (I've no idea how they got that finish), but are wholly unadapted to keeping a colony home warm in an Alaskan winter.

... That enough dark chocolate can mask the baking soda taste in glutenless brownies. I don't mind the gluten, but more dark chocolate is *always* a good answer... :)

... That ladies' magazines were circulating in the 1700's, and copies still exist.

... never go rafting without scouting the river. (Thankfully, that one's third hand).







yeah... this one qualifies as a good day, I think.

Ain't no playin' favorites.

When I started reading the Scots-Irish stuff, I must confess a dual reaction. The first was an exultation of "these... these are my people!. The second, with full "sinus salute" as Lawdog would have it.. "these.... sigh... these are my people."

Case in point. Source "Albion's Seed" - a fantastic - if at times dense - book on the immigration pattern into the American colonies. I've seen it referenced in several sources, so I'm finally picking through at least parts of it. And some parts just seem eerily familiar.

"... the people of the southern highlands would become famous in the nineteeth century for the intensity of their xenophobia, and also for the violence of its expression. In the early nineteenth century , they tended to detest great planters and abolitionists to equal measure. During the Civil War some fought against both sides. In the early twentieth century they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic. In our own time [copyright date 1989] they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists. The people of the southern highlands have been remarkable even-handed in their antipathies - which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion, or nationality."

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
David Hackett Fischer
p. 650


... I can't say I like everything the man has to say, but he is fair. :)




(As an aside - been re-listening to The Great Upheaval recently. I swear, between the frankly statist, militarist, half-a-step from monarchical Federalists on the one hand, and the Revolutionary Jacobin sympathizers (what with the militant atheism and murdering rampages in the name of the collective) on the other.... I think I'd be pretty much in a mood to hate everybody on the national stage to, were I alive in the 1790's.



Any similarity to current events is purely coincidental.... :)

Belief.

This last year has been a fascinating one.

I cannot remember a time ever when I've seen such an interest in the Founding generation. Perhaps in the Bicentennial year, though I am too young to remember that.

Still, I grew up in a history-loving family in a land that was wild frontier in that era, and the basics of the old life life had been lovingly preserved - or resurrected - by the time I came into my own. Whatever memories others have of the late 1980's, mine are full of hearth-cooked apples, of flax spun into linen, of men in frayed hunting coats and hatchets following in the path of their ancestors.

That's why I think it's so odd - and yet a giddily happy - thing to see fields of Gadsden flags on the news, to hear people seriously digging into our history again with both hands.

And yet. It's only recently that I've really started to appreciate the zeitgeist of the time. What people were thinking, what they believed.

One of those aspects has been haunting me of late is that of religion, and studying that of late has led me down the most fascinating rabbit trail. So pardon the rambling, here we go...





In reference to our current conflict - named or not - with militant Islam, I once heard a commentator say something to the effect of "the secular left discounts what these people say about themselves and their motivations, because their own worldview has no place for such convictions."

Certainly, it seems at least since Marx it's been the fashionable thing to see all conflict in economic terms - which makes it hard to appreciate that your opponent truly believes you're the Great Satan, and it's his duty to God to wipe you from the face of the earth, no matter how many times he might say so.


Very much the same is true of modern eyes looking back on our ancestors, I think. For all the talk of the "English Merchants' Civil War," and the selfish motivations of some of the inciters to rebellion once upon a time, I think the role of honest conviction is lost. Mercantile propaganda or no... you're not going to fill a line with people willing to face the cannon if all you've got to offer them is the promise of a bit more silver over the course of the year.

Certainly, not everyone came to the lines for the same reason... but lots of people did come, regardless of their interest in this tax or that mercantile policy.


Among the many of those motivations, of late I've been looking at the tangle of faiths in the era... Anglican vs the various dissenters in the Southern colonies particularly. These days it seems such a trivial thing - Episcopal church on one side of the road, Presbyterian there.. what's the difference? It's hard to remember that in the Founders' time, the wars of religion were scarce a century old, with aftershocks running straight through into their living memory.


And it was with that in mind - and in preparation for a trip to Colonial Williamsburg with my father - that I've been digging again through their podcasts.

The fascinating thing in the "religion" section is just how many popular conceptions - including quite a few I've always held from my own poor education - have ended up getting gored left and right.

Try this debate -

Part One (Henry) (MP3) (Text)
Part Two (Jefferson) (MP3) (Text)
Part Three (Debate, both men) (MP3) (Text)



Most prophetic to modern ears are I think Henry's words - "the care of the poor and the needy must necessarily fall to government if you remove it from religion. Where, sir, is that going to be a smaller government? It will not be." (Libertarians take note.. Mr. "Liberty or Death" Henry saying this while advocating mandatory tithing)

In effect, a similar welfare arrangement as today, except routed through the auspices of the church. Something to piss off everyone on all sides of the debate today. :)


There's a great deal more, but even that little bit is gonna be a fun one for me to mull over for a while.



Now - back to earning my bread. I got me some taxes to pay. :)

Cool breeze, sheltering trees, deep within the glen...

Yes, I know. It's been quiet around here of late. And to be perfectly honest, it probably will continue to be so a while longer. After so long cooped up indoors, I've been doing as much as I can away from the screen of late.

Short version of the last six weeks or so.. practiced and sewed, practiced and sewed, panicky sewing and practicing before spending a couple weeks demoing old crafts and harp music. A quick breather, than playing sales lady in between watching guys tossing rocks across a field. It's a better show that it sounds like. :)

From there.. meeting old friends, meeting new friends, and along the way drinking in a whole lotta sunshine, learning how to milk goats (neat!), getting a medieval archery lesson, poking around an old gold mine, hippie fairs, and beautiful gardens with Miss D, and studying till it feels like my ears are bleeding.

So... "if much was left unwritten, kindly remember much was lived."

Back in a bit. Hope you're have a marvelous summer, y'all. :)