Native Americans use this word to describe a tactic of absurd contrariness that conveys a ground level wisdom.  For instance, if a husband offends his wife, she may become “heyoka”.  When he’s hungry, she serves him a bowl of dirt; when he wishes to sleep, she noisily cleans the house; when he finally awakes, she falls asleep.  If the husband doesn’t substantially repent, it goes on indefinitely.  An episode of “heyoka” is vividly conveyed in Frederick Manfred’s fine novel, Lord Grizzly.

In fact, “heyoka” works to get out of ruts of all types, especially post-summer-garden funks.  We’re having intense tropical depressions lately, which doesn’t help the mild human kind.  So “heyoka” comes in handy.  If you wish to try something new to alleviate extreme boredom, try it out.

Want to sleep in?  Get up early.
Want to stay up late?  Go to bed early.
Hungry?  Don’t eat.
Feel tired?  Keep working.
Rested?  Don’t go to work.
Want to stay in?  Go out.
Want to go out?  Stay in.
Don’t want to clean up?  Clean up.
Want to clean up?  Don’t bother.
Want to go to the Bahamas?  Go to Anchorage.

Perhaps the medical community has a better idea. Plus, this may be related to the previous post about the “changeling garden”. Maybe my “heyoka” blues cure is, for once, not to tear out the gardens and start anew every year.  Off to Anchorage!

Steve Tobin has been my friend for almost 20 years, during which time I’ve watched his work change from glass to metal, and from large to enormous. We decided to exhibit some of his latest sculpture for the next 18 months on our lawns and meadows here at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The following photos show a small sample. We display also works by Densaburo Oku, Daisuke Shintani and Eric Finnerty.

The exhibit is viewable on our Garden Conservancy Open Days and other Heronswood, The Cook’s Garden and Burpee events, or by appointment. We welcome tour groups as well. Please call 215-345-1766 or leave a message.

“Sunflower” in mist	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Bronze Root” on Main House lawn	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
Monumental group on Great Lawn:	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Steel Roots” left and center, “Weeds” in distance right and “Iron Shoots” at right.
“Bamboo” near the Springhouse Garden	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Syntax” near Happiness Garden	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Syntax”	Photo by Mary Kliwinski
“Steel Root” with “Iron Shoots”	Photo by Kenneth Ek

I just spent a long weekend attending a wedding in San Francisco at the Embarcadero Hyatt down near the water, the old Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. The city rises up from there so I walked a lot—up to Chinatown, North Beach and over to the old Tenderloin, as well as along the Embarcadero, a bayfront parkway that resembles the Croisette in Cannes. San Francisco is scenic, with high hills and water on three sides. A center of transience, it is rooted in a colorful past, from its military origin to its boomtown days and perpetual status as a busy port. Even the bridges seem to point elsewhere.

The wedding party was small enough – about 150 – that conversations moved beyond the surface. The main topic of out-of-towners was the street people. Several of us saw people in horrifying condition talking on cell phones. I saw a man in chino pants and a blue button-down shirt rummaging through trash cans, as if he had been fired, moments before, from a software firm and needed food or stuff to turn in for cash. Someone said that California is in a crisis due to having downsized its state mental hospitals and outpatient clinics a few years ago. The feds have stepped in because the streets and the prisons are overflowing with disturbed people. Now San Francisco is a boomtown for clinical psychiatrists. I hadn’t spent time in a city center for many years, so I was shocked by the misery. My heart went out to these folks.

Some street people performed music. At the corner of Drumm and California, there was a man in his 60’s with a CD player, speakers on the sides and a stage mic on a stand plugged into the system. He not only sang along with James Brown, he performed all the dances and mic stand tosses. He was in great shape and had JB’s voice down perfectly. I enjoyed it, dropping dollars after every song in the black hat he had sitting on the sidewalk.

A few of us strolled several hours every day talking about old times and looking for street scenes from the “Dirty Harry” movies, “Bullitt” and “The Killer Elite”. We always had lunch at Crepes and Curry, a takeout stand run by an immigrant Chinese couple next to the Hyatt. It was delicious and cheap. The couple spoke perfect English. We talked about the Hakka.

The wedding ceremony was in Tiburon at St. Hilary’s, a lovely little chapel on a steep hill overlooking the ocean. The pew cushions were embroidered with California wildflowers – mine was Castilleja neglecta, or Sierra Paintbrush. The ceremony was a Lutheran-Jewish-Confucian affair. The Chinese family blessings were exquisite. The Chinese bride’s mother hoped that the couple’s love for each other would be like that between a mother and child, while the father similarly asked that they love each other in the same way that he loved his daughter. The women cried, the girls giggled.

After church the bride kept reappearing in different gowns all afternoon and evening. The finale was a gorgeous scarlet red sheath with gold embroidery. Reception banquet games included the groom standing motionless on a chair in the spotlight while the bride passed a raw egg under one pant cuff, up the leg, across the crotch, down the other leg and out the cuff unbroken. A degree in psychiatry is required to figure it out. Another had him blindfolded and passed along a line of all the young ladies, including the bride, to brush each pair of hands with his fingertips and pick out his beloved. Of course, he chose a 12-year-old ingénue to everyone’s delight and laughter. Strangely, almost no one danced. Since most of the guests were immigrant Chinese, I attributed it to their lack of an informal dance tradition. In Costa Rica, the dancing would have started before the food was served, and lasted all night. Alas, this was a sit-down affair that broke up at 10. I was one of a few who danced, and there was a game Chinese woman who broke with tradition and we cut the rug for half an hour. She works at a beauty salon in Millbrae. Later, I showered the newlyweds with a hundred one dollar bills as they slow danced. This went over big with the Chinese, who told me of their old custom of the wedding couple crossing “the golden door”, a ceremonial threshold festooned with gold coins and jewelry. One guy said that this is why so many Chinese restaurants have “golden” in their names. The groom is a sous-chef at Quince, an upscale restaurant, while the bride, a real estate broker, teaches ESL and deals blackjack at a local casino until the market picks back up.

San Francisco offers enjoyable visual scenes, surprisingly good modern skyscraper architecture, a small garden at Golden Gate Park featuring stunning dahlias, and great bookstores. Stacey’s, on Market Street just a mile or so up from the Embarcadero, has an excellent selection. There’s an art museum called “deYoung” in Golden Gate Park which has fine paintings of California. The new Dale Chihuly show was by tour only and we had no time to wait. Too bad, I’m a big fan. The 100 foot tower atop the already high-perched museum offers great 360 views, except that tall people look at the bottom edge of a grated awning that drops over the upper quarter of the floor to ceiling glass windows. It was okay for folks under 6’, but a drag for the rest of us. I had to stoop to see the horizon, Mount Tam, the Golden Gate and the pretty hills. The deYoung is not far from a charming neighborhood, “the Richmond”, where a friend gave a party. It is prosperous, but not wealthy, and sits high on a mesa, with wide streets and two-story apartment buildings that resemble vacation homes at an old-fashioned beach resort. It includes a small Russian community, as well as many Asian ethnic groups. Great light in the area too, probably due to the continuous thin cloud cover blowing overhead, rather like western Holland. San Francisco neighborhoods have wide streets by design, due to the many earthquakes requiring good access for rescue and clean-up operations.

Monday was spent with friends going up to Muir Woods, which is an indescribably magical experience. We drove on northward and westward to find the fenced-off section of the San Andreas Fault. Even with a good map, we didn’t find it. We stopped for coffee in Olema, population 55. The landscape northwest of San Rafael features high watery meadows brushed with fog, like a deep green Italian coast, with little mountains and petite rocky cliffs.

Finally, a word about the awe-inspiring Golden Gate Bridge. It’s brown colored, not golden. I thought the “golden” referred to the Gold Rush, but someone said it was named before, and probably due to the spectacular light at sunset. I fancied for a moment that it was named for all the Chinese weddings.

With about 10 million customers, Burpee draws data from a wide cross-section of avid gardeners: high, medium and low income; urban, suburban and rural; old and young; male and female.  The US conforms to the UK and Europe in nearly all categories.  Most gardeners are about 40 or older; just over half are women; home ownership is the single greatest factor; yard size is an obvious key variable, right up there with age. (You don’t see throngs of middle-aged people night clubbing.)  These similarities are neither controversial nor even arguable.  They’re as plain as the dirt on your shoes.

However, there is one big difference in the gardening activities between us and the UK and Europe—gender.  Take the customary associations of flowers and vegetables and reverse them. European, and especially British, men grow ornamentals in roughly the same proportion that US men grow vegetables.  Similarly, European women overwhelmingly dominate the kitchen garden and leave the flowers and shrubbery to the men.  They expect to be given flowers—not to grow them.  On the European continent, there is a bit more sharing, but only on the vegetable side.

For example, all the notable European flower breeders of the last century were men, including many amateurs, blunting the argument that institutional sexism was the main cause.  Granted, middle-class “career women”, outside politics and professions like medicine and law, remain a curiosity in Europe and the UK.  Left to the routine of domestic life, the sexes segregate distinctly from the front of the home, where men grow ornamentals, to the back, where the women grow the vegetables and herbs.  From a design standpoint, this traditional layout is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also practical in the densely populated towns and cities typical of Europe.  By contrast, in the countryside, especially in France and Switzerland, unprotected vegetable gardens dot the roadside next to the sides of homes as well as the backs.  Yet even there the gender tradition holds firm.  I’ll never forget some male French friends who laughed at my idea of adding vegetables to their ornamental gardening routine.

In the UK, where garden preferences are nearly opposite those of the traditional US, most homes are located in dense urban areas.  The model British row houses—which we imitated in eastern US cities—have, in effect, two gardens, front and back.  The men dominate the front, the women the back.  In the US it’s almost exactly the reverse, with the exception of the heavily British areas of the east coast, such as around Boston, where men’s garden clubs still thrive as mainly ornamental-oriented societies.

However, both Burpee statistics as well as anecdotal evidence indicate that US men grow most—but not all—the vegetables, especially the vine crops where fencing is involved, and large plantings of root crops where much physical labor is involved.  For one droll example, cucumbers are grown almost entirely by men. On the other hand, lower maintenance veggies, such as lettuce, are split more evenly 50-50.  Upper body strength has something to do with US garden preferences, as does the agrarian—versus industrial—origin of American life. More of us were peasants and farmers for a much longer period of time than our counterparts in heavily industrialized Europe, especially the UK and Germany.

Also, I speculate that the promotion of flower growing to women in the early 20th century reflected the early phase of the modern women’s movement that led ultimately to feminism. Why should men be the only ones growing the flowers?  Indeed, even today flower growing remains a bit of a men’s club, particularly in high-end shrubs and trees.

The only place in Europe where the men share the vegetable garden is Southern Italy and Greece.  This must be related to the important place they have in the kitchen, especially in Greece, where men prepare most family meals, with the women handling the table and shopping the markets where no home garden is possible.  Of course, the men run the flour mills, oil presses, vineyards and wineries, which remain extraordinarily decentralized, or on a village level, to a degree unknown elsewhere.  In the US one can still see this Greek tradition in the preponderance of restaurants and diners owned and run exclusively by men.

It is also interesting to see the male-dominated flower breeding traditions of Europe carried on, to this day, by amateur flower breeders in the US.  Personally, I find this quite odd.  Even US native plants, such as Rudbeckia and Echinacea, were bred by European men in the late 20th century—’Goldsturm’ by a German estate gardener and ‘Magnus’ by a Swedish amateur, respectively, each the classic of their type. Today, few women in the US are carrying forward the early feminist project of ornamental horticulture, except in the non-profit world of public gardens and trade associations, where they are better represented.  My sister, Anna, of Ball Seed fame (an entirely separate company) is an extraordinary exception in the world of commercial horticulture.  However, I guarantee she became President due to her ability rather than her gender.  Perhaps US women shy away from flowers due to the conventional imagery of the “flower lady” and the nuptial bouquet.  Too bad.  The field is wide open to qualified American women.

A hybrid of “get rich quick”, but with social responsibility and a sense of flair.  I’m itching to do these projects.  Anyone want to help?

By Lois Burpee

Eight years of boarding school and college menus, and four years of stretching the dollar-a-day budget, while sharing an apartment with a sister or friend in the depression years, were a culinary vacuum, with one exception.  While at Wellesley College, I was introduced to Chinese food.  A group of students who had lived abroad and had some association with China met for inexpensive dinners in Cambridge or Boston at a Chinese restaurant.  Then a friend of one of my college friends opened a Chinese restaurant in Wellesley, and my friend and I visited its kitchen frequently.  I was fascinated with Chinese cooking methods and utensils.  Everything could be prepared so quickly.  These experiences intensified my delight later when I actually had my own vegetable garden.

I was a botany major at college.  After graduating in 1934, I spent two years in Baltimore studying.  Fortunately, my small apartment was near a farmers’ market.  I was hoping to find a job in the field of horticulture, and one day I received a letter suggesting that I write to the W. Atlee Burpee Company.  As luck would have it, the International Flower show was to be held in Baltimore in a few weeks.  The Burpee Company would have a booth there and would need temporary help for the duration of the show.  It was there that I met David Burpee.

After the show, I was asked to come to Philadelphia for an interview and was given the position of technical correspondent for the Flower Department.

I knew little about flower varieties, so spent many Saturday mornings in the summer studying the flowers in the trials field at Fordhook Farms on the edge of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  Seed of all the flowers listed in the catalog were test grown along with test rows of the breeding work done in California.  There were vegetable trials also, but they were in a distant field.  Occasionally Mr. Burpee joined me there.

After a year I was asked to also do library research for Mr. Burpee on the history and development of marigolds and other major classes of flowers, such as zinnias and petunias.  To make it easier to have access to the library at the Museum of Natural History, I was given an office and typist in downtown Philadelphia.  Occasionally Mr. Burpee stopped in and took me out to lunch.  One day, quite unexpectedly, he proposed.  For the first time I became aware of his ploy to get me away from everyone at the main office.  Soon after, he left for an inspection trip to California and the downtown office was closed.

I came to Fordhook Farm as Mrs. Burpee in July 1938.  Now I had lots of time to spend in the flower rows and also the vegetable trials, but I also had to plan meals.  A huge vegetable garden had been planted for the homestead use.  It seemed that every vegetable in the catalog was growing there.  The gardener brought in baskets of whatever was ready to use (usually larger or beyond the best stage for delicacy) as he had done while Mr. Burpee was a bachelor.  Curiosity got the best of me.  There were so many vegetables listed in the catalog and growing in the vegetable-testing trial rows that I had never heard of.  And why so many varieties – did they have different tastes and textures?  I found out that they did.  I was fortunate to have an experienced cook in the kitchen, as all this was quite different from my past housekeeping experiences.  The following years I selected the seeds for any of the new varieties we were thinking of introducing through the catalog.

The first few years at Fordhook, while our daughter and son were young, I did not do the physical work in the garden but supervised the planting of the seeds so that we would have variety all through the season.  The soil here was different from any I had been used to, fine and heavy – even radishes had to be dug, and the root crops were stubby and tough.

Gradually the old gardener retired and I had to become more involved in the garden because my help did not have experience.  I was determined to do something about the soil.  We had riding horses, plenty of leaves in the fall, and lawn clippings in the summer – why not take advantage of them?  So I selected an area of the garden in which to improve the soil.  It was a strip twenty feet wide, and this width gave me eighteen-foot rows that were just right for most succession plantings for my household of five to six persons and even some extra for freezing.

This size garden I could almost handle by myself, and it became a pleasure to work in.  I did the planting and picking and supervised the weeding.  Yes, weeding needs supervision, for so often it disturbs the roots of the vegetables.  When the plants are young, I cut the weeds off at ground level with a knifelike tool called a horse’s hoof trimmer.  The less the soil is disturbed, the better the plants will grow.

As I plant seeds, I think of the size of the seed, what it is to become, and the struggle it will have to come through the earth.  When the directions on a seed packet say the plants should be ten or more inches apart and seeds are smaller than peas, I sow three or four seeds in each of the ten-inch spaces.  When the seeds sprout, the groups of seedlings help each other through the soil and there will not be gaps in the row.  Later, I cut out the extra plants.  Many new gardeners have said that they hate to thin out young plants, but this must be done.  Unless a plant has space in which to develop properly, it will not produce because it cannot get enough food.

Poring over the catalog to make out my seed order, I got curious as to how the breeders were making their taste tests, and I learned that they usually tested the vegetables raw as they examined them in the fields.  I discussed this with Mr. Burpee, commenting that, since the final use of vegetables was in the home, they ought to be tested as part of a meal.  Well, I gave myself quite a job with this suggestion.  Now our meals frequently included more than one kind of bean, pea, or beet.  Divided vegetable dishes and small garden labels came in handy for identification.  We didn’t always prefer the new introductions, but we discussed all their qualities – plant habit, ease of picking, and such.  We did not find a bean we preferred in flavor to Tenderpod, though others are better producers.

Early on I discovered the Lutz Green Leaf Winterkeeper beet, a late, very sweet variety.  But it’s an ugly duckling, with a tendency to have light rings that breeders do not like.  To me the flavor is the best of all beets, and the foliage stays green when cooked, as it does not have a red stem.  The company dropped this beet from the catalog one year – and I yelled.  It was not a good seller, they said.  Of course not, because the description did not point out its best qualities.  So they included it again with a more “tasteful” description, and it’s still in the catalog.  I’ve found that Lutz Green Leaf Winterkeeper is also the favorite of other kitchen gardeners.

Most of Burpee’s new vegetable introductions to American gardeners came from the Orient, and some indication of how they were cooked there came with them.  So I experimented with how they could be prepared in an American home.  I also had some help from the kitchen testing department of the Farm Journal, a magazine that had a long history of cooperation with the Burpee Company.  Missionaries from lands to which the vegetables were indigenous sent in more recipes.  This was fine, except when I was asked to prepare samples in quantity for the annual garden writers’ luncheons.  Then it was a job.  The writers asked for the recipes, and that is how I really got into vegetable cooking.  I was literally challenged into it.

Excerpt from “Lois Burpee’s Gardener’s Companion and Cookbook” (1983)

In the middle of writing a non-fiction book on the history of the world’s religions, I despair about finishing before it’s too late.  Writing a book requires much more careful thought than I imagined.  As much heat as light: preparation, outline, sources, sentence and paragraph structure, etc.  It’s true that a plan is crucial.  Also, professionals say that, at some point, I’ll begin rewriting.  However, it won’t be soon.

Certainly, part of the reason for writer’s block is distraction.  But it goes much deeper.  For example, reading on the web warps the mental processes developed over years of normal concentration levels.  One doesn’t read on the internet as much as looks at words.  This habit weakens the mind and negatively affects the ability to think.  People used to say this about the passivity induced by television.  I believe it.  I consider TV to be satanic, but not the web, at least so far.  Recently, a visiting friend told me about the Kindle, a “book machine” from Amazon.  I’d heard positive reports about it from others.  He went out to his car to get it.  What a let-down.  It is not much different from staring at a computer screen.  If anything, the deception caused by the positive PR it has received makes it worse.  “Why lug books around anymore?” my friend asked.  “Why not?” I wondered.  Indeed, what’s the advantage?  I don’t read two or three books at a time and, if I did, a few extra ounces in my briefcase wouldn’t be a problem.  I like books.  Other Kindle disadvantages include an unpleasant tactile experience (it feels dirty) and an inability to flip around, which I love to do.  Also, pressing yet another of life’s many buttons to turn a page – ugh.

However, the main objection is the subtle shift – both away from an individual book and toward an impersonal electronic medium that looks eerily like an eye – that is scary and possesses a profound implication.  Like television, which “sees” for you, Kindle seems to “think”, or read, for you.  No thanks.  There are enough electronic media already, and I have neither a computer nor a cell phone.  I plan to continue living without them.  I write long hand and give everything to my secretary.  I can’t imagine what kids go through these days, in addition to the commonplace temptations of the serpents in the rose garden of new media.  The obesity epidemic is nothing compared to what’s going on in their heads.  I believe computers destroy the ability to think.  I realize this is a cliché.  However, I haven’t faced it until now.  It has made writing harder for me.  I’m used to both reading and writing notes, comments, trip reports, field observations, catalog copy and press releases – much of it on the internet at work.  Writing a serious book of non-fiction is like running a marathon.

P.S.  Isn’t Mrs. Burpee great?!  She went to Wellesley College in the mid 1930s and married the son of our founder after working as an intern at Fordhook Farm.  She helped David Burpee connect with the missionary community in Asia who provided him with samples of unusual vegetables.  Brilliant and creative in her own right, she joined with her friend and fellow missionary brat, Pearl Buck, to found Welcome House, one the nation’s leading orphanages.  Also, after I bought Fordhook, I discovered a pair of large old freezers in the basement.  Mrs. Burpee used to clip newspaper coupons for meat and especially chicken and then drive around to all the grocery stores in her station wagon.  She could feed an army from those freezers.  Dynamite lady.

The excerpt is from her hard-to-find cookbook, Lois Burpee’s Gardener’s Companion and Cookbook.

By Lois Burpee

“How did you, the wife of David Burpee, become interested in vegetables?” is a question frequently asked me—as though I had become a traitor to my husband and his passion for flowers. I am expected to be a flower expert, especially of marigolds, not vegetables. “I just did” is hardly a satisfactory answer. So I got to wondering myself and concluded that perhaps the varied experiences I had with food as I grew from a child—with a child’s typical aversion to vegetables—to a homemaker on Fordhook Farms may have had something to do with it.

I was born in Tiberias, Palestine, where my father, a Scot, had founded a medical mission. But I woke up mentally in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1914, when we had to flee from Palestine at the start of World War I. The war limited variety in our food. Meats, sugar, and fats were strictly rationed. (I remember being shocked at a family dinner when an aunt was so bold as to sprinkle sugar on chocolate pudding. We all would have preferred it sweeter, too, but to be so extravagant was unthinkable.) It was a treat when my father, then medical director of the Oakbank Army Hospital, brought home some beef drippings, which we spread on bread as a flavorful substitute for oleomargarine.

The only vegetables I remember being served at dinner besides potatoes were carrots and turnips, and I thought that to like them one would have to have red hair. In a dish in the center of the dining-room table, tangy garden cress grew on wet absorbent cotton. It looked like a tiny forest, and the peppery leaves had a delightful taste. I have recreated this dish of cress many times. It’s ready to eat ten days after the seed is planted.

Early in 1919, we came to America to visit my mother’s parents in Hartford, Connecticut. Grandma made a delicious crispy pickle of Jerusalem artichokes, which grew in a corner of the backyard. We spent a fairytale summer right next to a real farm in the small town of Winchester. There was so much for me, my three sisters, and my little brother to explore there! Grandpa taught us what berries we could pick, and we walked miles to the best wild strawberry patches. The berries were pretty well mashed by our return, but were still good for shortcake made with hot baking-powder biscuits. We were introduced to corn on the cob, of course, and just couldn’t believe that we were really allowed to pick it up in our fingers.

In the fall of 1919, we returned to Palestine on a small steamer. My most vivid recollections of the trip are the flavor of café au lait—made with condensed milk, of course—and a storm in which the bathtub broke loose. The roll of the ship had got the best of me—I was lying in my berth, eyes glued to the porthole, through which I would sometimes see only sky, then the top of the waves, and, for an interminable length of time, only water. At last, with relief, I saw the skyline and sky again, but for far too short a time. A woman’s voice shrieking, “The bathtub’s broken loose, the bathtub’s broken loose,” broke the spell that the porthole held over me. Fear turned to laughter. We were told later that some of the ship’s cargo had also broken loose and slid off center so the ship could not completely right itself. When we finally reached port, it still listed to one side.

Arriving in Tiberias was a broad leap into an entirely new world—not only a new home, but new languages and new foods. I loved the fruits, but, oh my, the strong flavors of the food! Stuffed eggplant was cooked with tomatoes and both ripe and green olives, some of which were quite bitter. Everything seemed to be sour except lentils and bulgur. But the desserts, served only at feasts, were devastatingly sweet. The memory of little hollow doughnutlike balls full of syrup flavored with rosewater still haunts me. They were made from small balls of raised dough, cooked first in hot fat and then in the syrup. I’ve tried to make them but haven’t been able to get the syrup inside. Eating a whole cherry tomato reminds me of them—not the flavor, of course, but what happens in the mouth.

All vegetables that could be eaten raw—radishes, lettuce, carrots, and, of course, tomatoes—were grown in the hospital compound, where they would not become contaminated. The cress that used to grow in the dish on the table in Scotland sprouted in the garden overnight and was eaten in a few days. Then we replanted more cress.

I was miserable for a long time. Breakfast was the only meal I really liked. Of course, I had to eat what I was served. None of this business of “What would you like?” in those days. Gradually, some dishes became not too distasteful. Curiosity got the best of me. Why did people like these strong-flavored foods? Perhaps I would like them, too. I would find out only by tasting.

We children had a large breakfast with fruits and cooked cereal. Lunch, with the adults, was composed of Arabic dishes: stuffed vegetable marrow, which is like zucchini, cooked in leban (a form of yogurt); eggplant and tomato stew; boiled lentils or bulgur with ground lamb or goat; and occasionally stewed rabbit or chicken, which the family raised. We children had our early supper of eggs, bread, and olives. I learned to love olives and also lebanee, which is like cream cheese but more sour. It was kept in olive oil and spread on fresh Arabic bread, then sprinkled with zatre, a dried mixture of sorrel and winter savory.

I was fascinated by what went on in the outbuildings behind the hospital. In one, the washerwomen did the laundry in huge built-in caldrons. They often brought in plants to nibble on, whatever was growing on the hillsides. So I began to look around the compound grounds and take them all sorts of plants to see if they would eat them, too. Often they ate only the succulent inner part of the stem. Some plants, like a daisy-type one, they said were too soapy.

Two other buildings were the hospital kitchens: one for preparing food for the Moslem and Christian patients and staff, the other a spotless kitchen with lots of shiny pots on the walls where meals were prepared for the Jewish patients. My excursions to these were only in the late afternoon on Saturday, because our days were quite regulated. I watched, fascinated, and sometimes tasted the tidbits offered me. Gradually I sort of got to like Arabic food. Years later I had a yen for the flavors I remembered.

Another Saturday pastime for us children was cooking. We had one of the little buildings along the compound wall for a playroom. Among the few toys we brought with us from the United States were little cast-iron stoves. We each had one and used charcoal for fuel. We were permitted to use anything that grew in the garden as well as eggs from our chickens. We tested the things the washerwomen ate and roasted all sorts of seeds to see if we could make imitation coffee. I remember clearly one day when I got some salt and added it to the potato and egg mess I was cooking. I proudly announced that salt made it taste better. My older sister squelched my pride by responding, “Melani [the cook] always uses salt!”

After my father’s death we came to America again in 1924. By this time Grandpa had retired to the old family homestead in northwestern Connecticut. His occupation now was tending his vegetable garden and one row of sweet peas, which we children had to pick faithfully every other day to keep them blooming. His garden soil was sandy and the season short, but what wonderful vegetables he could grow! And, to my surprise, they were good to eat. Our meals were such traditional New England dishes as fresh peas with young carrots lightly seasoned with a slice of salt pork fat (not smoked) and desserts sweetened with dark molasses. I can still visualize Grandpa poring over the Burpee seed catalog in the winter, planning his next year’s garden.

When mother took over the kitchen, she had to relearn how to cook. There was one huge white cookbook to which she often referred, and the food order was phoned in to the one butcher and one grocer in the town once a week. To save time (or maybe it was an old custom), one large piece of meat was ordered. We had it hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, and what we children called third-day roast on Tuesday. I have followed this tradition in some ways, but have the hot roast on Saturday and the cold meat on Sunday, as I find a day of rest from cooking quite relaxing. The old New England custom of having hot baked beans and brown bread on Saturday and eating them cold on Sunday is really not a bad idea. Instead of cold baked beans, I do something with all the leftover vegetables in the refrigerator, such as making a casserole with a cheese cream  sauce.

Grandma made the gingerbread. This was important because Grandpa had to have the gingerbread every night for supper. She baked it in a large blackened pan about three inches deep that was almost as large as the oven.

My two older sisters took over the few times when Mother was not home. They objected to my being in the kitchen because they said I was always washing my hands and getting in the way. My oldest sister usually made a cake. One day they were also away. I was to be in charge of preparing dinner (a cold meat day, of course). This was my opportunity to show my cooking prowess. I decided to make a sponge cake, which would not need frosting. I had Grandma’s gingerbread pan in mind for cooking it in.

So I got out the one big cookbook and looked up the recipe. It called for one cup of flour. How could that possibly make enough for eight people and have some left over? I decided to triple the recipe and increase the amount of lemon extract, as it seemed much too little. I put my batter in the gingerbread pan and placed it in the bottom of the hot oven to bake (I didn’t know how to raise the shelf). Soon there was a delightful aroma—then one of burning. I peeked in the oven. The cake was flowing over the edges of the pan. Oh, well I thought, let it bake anyway. I did know that I should not disturb a baking cake. The burning smell got stronger and stronger, but it was not yet time to take the cake from the oven.

When the time did come, the cake looked fine on top, but the oven was a mess. All the family returned for dinner, and I proudly served the cake in the large pan. My oldest sister facetiously remarked, “Are we still eating this cake?” Of course, it was burnt on the bottom, and the lemon flavor was overwhelming. I was so disappointed. To this day, I can’t stand synthetic lemon seasoning, and I seldom bake a cake.

To be continued.