Fanny Farmer

 

Labor Day is coming and we think of simple folks who just worked hard. Fanny had a stroke at 16. It paralyzed her severely, she was wheelchair bound and had to relearn to talk.  What, she wondered, could she do with her life now? As she began to recover some ability to communicate, she gave much thought to how she could serve her family.   She would become the family cook!. Forget marrying into a leading Boston Brahmin clan or careers. Faith in God suddenly consumed her. She would just be a household servant.

            But as Fanny Merritt Farmer learned to cook, she was struck by how hard it was.  First, cookbooks relied on a lot of intuitive cooking experience.  They would list ingredients as “a hand full of flour,” or “pinch of salt” or “enough whiskey to taste.” Most cooks were women, considered emotional and none too scientific. Plus, no one explained how to serve the food.  Was one to just dump it altogether on a plate, or separate it?  And what was the manner of consumption—mopping up gravy with bread or what?  Fanny’s attempts at recipes were very much trial and error. But with good intuition, she managed to solve the mysteries.  She found there were Old English measures-- teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, that had precise meaning and she wrote copious notes.  Food had to be served so it was pleasing to the eye, taste and smell.  Eventually her health recovered until she could walk with a cane and she turned her parents’ house into a boarding house renowned for wonderful food. Mrs. Charles Shaw encouraged her to go to Boston Cooking School. And so at age 30, in 1889, she limped into classes and began.  Combining what she knew on her own, she learned nutrition, cooking for the ill, and household management.  First their top student, then assistant director, in 1891, she was hired as principal.

            The school already had a recipe book, but Fanny re-did the recipes including her measures.  She was very matter-of-fact in explanations, leaving nothing unexplained.  A cup of flour meant a level cup, sifted to ensure against variation in density. She wrote articles on housekeeping, drying fruits, pickling and canning.  1850 recipes were compiled.  And then using her father, an editor, as a guide, she published the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.  The publisher, Little & Brown, thought no one would buy it. It was too encyclopedic.  The 1896 printing was just a few copies which soon sold out. It took America by storm.  Demand for measuring cups and spoons became a growth industry. For the first time, exact recipes were to be found. The book was comprehensive, a definitive work on American cooking. People nicknamed the title “The Fanny Farmer Cookbook”. And it is still in publication today.

            Farmer eventually started her own cooking school but never forgot her mission to help those who were sick.  It eventually led her to develop a complete work of diet and nutrition for the ill, Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent, which contained thirty pages on diabetes.  She explained digestion and which foods were able to digest easily and rapidly.  She thought hard about presentation.  A plate must look beautiful and tempting for those who were not inclined to eat.  At length she investigated nutrition and how important it was to health.

            In 1906 she suffered another stroke. Amazingly, it did not stop her lectures to chefs, dieticians and Harvard Medical School.  Her lectures were picked up by the Boston Evening Transcript and printed regularly, even reprinted in the Tulsa World in that new state of Oklahoma. “The time is not far distant when knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one’s education. Then mankind will eat to live, be able to do better mental and physical work, and disease will be less frequent.” To food preparers worldwide she was the epitome of organized artistic cooking.  But as Fanny once said, “In Jesus Christ, no one’s life goes to waste.”

Anti-social behavior in Riots and looting

 

So you can’t reform a rioter, I heard at the Oklahoma Republican Committee Meeting. They had some new legislators introduce themselves and speak briefly.  Rep. Randy Randlewood of District 15 in eastern OK (been Dem represented for almost 100 years!) got up and said that he had checked this and discovered he was the first psychologist ever elected to the OK legislature.  Everyone laughed and cheered.  But I caught him after the talk and visited for awhile.  Illuminating.  His firm serves 115 public schools and the OK Corrections Dept. He began to talk about what was happening with Antifa.  The fact that they were indiscriminate in the damage they do, and to the people they beat to near death, worries psychologists--this is Antisocial Behavior.  That’s the way people behave when they have had so many abuses/traumas in their lives or have dug themselves into such a hole of crime that they are essentially beyond therapy.  Their hate is so complexly ingrained, they will slit a throat in the morning and then continue on the rest of the day as if nothing had happened.  Like the BTK killer of Wichita?  Randy agreed said that short of a true spiritual awakening, these folks are virtually unreformable and must be watched by authorities constantly.  When these folks are young they often torture and kill animals. And the indiscrimate attacks?  Normal people, committed to a cause think about how some behavior appears to others.  When someone tears down monuments to both Lincoln and a confederate general, or burns both black and white businesses, indiscriminate behavior, it shows they’re just tearing things down and burning—just showing hatred of everybody and everything, i.e. antisocial.  And if some group like the Democrats think they are going to take advantage of this anger, they will soon learn that such individuals will not stop looting and rioting when the Democrats call a hault. Only force dissuades and curbs them.

Kepler, perhaps the first true scientist

Johannes Kepler was walking in a Prague snowfall feeling badly about not having a New Year’s gift for his friend Mattias Wacker in 1610.  It got him to thinking about snowflakes, how each was unique and six-sided.  He began thinking about the mathematics of snow, always six-sided yet each flake unique. Made of frozen water, perhaps the frozen form must be arranging itself to minimize space, like a six-sided honeycomb.  His quick study turned out to be a pamphlet-book, On The Six-Sided Snowflake, which he sent to his friend as a gift, then published it in 1611. That paper is now considered the origin of cystallography.  “For a long time,” he later wrote, I wanted to become a theologian.  Now however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.”  Kepler had no doubt that God was a God of reason and order, a mathematician who left clues in nature for man to comprehend. 

            He was a German Lutheran boy and the Danish master astronomer, Tycho Brahe, had lent him a set of instruments. There was no word for ‘scientist’ in 1600.  He called himself  a “grubber for facts” from an expression about how farm chickens peck around grubbing for food.  On Feb. 19, 1604, Kepler was trying to measure the position of Mars and freezing, was disgusted with his results. Other astronomers like Copernicus felt that measurements within 10 minutes of a degree where just fine.  Kepler wanted a single minute.  Copernicus had merely speculated that the sun was the center of the solar system and that planets went around in circles on crystalline spheres.  Brahe had disproven the crystal spheres theory. Now what?  Kepler knew the answer was to postulate orbits, mere paths in space and what if there were forces around an object?  If you were trying to row a boat across a raging river, you’d curve your trajectory but a circular path is hardly expected.  He tried to fit a circular orbit to Mars but it didn’t work.  He tried an ellipse with the sun at a focus, from better data on a warmer night and found a perfect fit. In 1606 he published his book, New Star, explaining his measurements in exacting detail, including his wife’s acid critique and all the false turns and observations gone wrong.  These were expanded upon in 1609’s New Astronomy including 3 laws of planetary motion. Measurements were no longer approximations, but mathematical facts. The force in space was not a raging river, but, the world would find out the meaning of gravity.

            The reader must understand this era. Salem’s Witch Trials were 80 years into the future.  Everyone believed witches existed and magic too. Mathematicians like Galileo had a day job of teaching accounting. A new tool of medicine was bleeding the patient.  But Kepler was certain in his deep Christian faith that God had patterns in nature and he worked hard to decipher them.  When he discovered his 3 planetary laws, he experienced something of a spiritual epiphany, writing a prayer at the end of his thesis, “God, graciously cause these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and the salvation of souls.”  Kepler was not only the first mathematical scientific theorist, his findings  led to the surprising recognition that religious  motivation can sometimes make discoveries and it led to change the course of scientific history.

            In 1615, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew resulting in Katharina being accused of witchcraft. In August 1620, she was imprisoned for fourteen months. Katharina was subjected to territio verbalis, a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess.  Johannes came to her trial with stories of how she had raised him to love Jesus, so how could she collude with Satan? He put together a strong legal defense the way a scientist proves truth.  The court was flabbergasted. The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors. Katharina was released.  As the case became known, all of Germany began to debate, as Kepler had done, whether witches really were powerful or even existed. 

            Order, simplicity, beauty of nature, directed by a seemingly intelligent harmony—even secular scientists cannot get away from these assumptions today which are Christian to the hilt. The first theoretical science is often attributed to a premature-born, sickly  boy from a small town near Stuttgart who believed the gospel with all his heart.

Robert E Lee & statue controversy

The President asked him to be supreme commander of the Northern Army but Robert E. Lee declined.  He was against slavery, his farm was right across the river from Washington, DC, but he sadly thought the Union was falling apart. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages,” he had written 3 years earlier.  But if the union was to fall, his first duty was to Virginia, his home state.  (We have to discern that loyalty to one’s state was strong among those born around 1800)  Lee had been the son of a Revolutionary War general and his wife was Mary Custis, step-great granddaughter of George Washington. Like Lincoln, Lee wanted negotiation between the two sides of hothead abolitionists and white-supremacist slave owners.  Virginians saw S. Carolinans to be much at fault for the revolt. They were deep into cotton and slavery.  Lincoln alleged the union was at stake and no family had been more involved in establishing the union than Lee’s. A lesser known fact about secession was that the aristocratic, plantation-owning portion of the south demanded revolt, yet only 704 legislators/delegates voted for secession--until events swept half the states into the Confederacy. Only 6% of southerners owned slaves.

            Lee reluctantly resigned his position in the US Army and went to Richmond as a military advisor to Jefferson Davis.  But when Gen. Johnston was killed in 1862, Lee was given command of the Army of Northern Virginia. In many ways he was the South’s answer to Lincoln, a leader whose personal probity and virtuous inspiration sanctified their cause.  He had served with distinction in the Mexican War and 32 years as an army engineer, was second in his class at Westpoint, then appointed to head that institution.  But he had something to live down.  His father, Revolutionary War general ‘light horse Harry’ Lee had not served Washington well, had been a crooked governor of Virginia and put the family into bankruptcy. So Lee set himself deliberately on a path to uphold family honor.

            He was a strong Episcopal Christian who hated slavery. “In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength.”  When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became estate executor and promised to free all the slaves.  Things didn’t go well when the slaves found out they were to go free in 5 years and several ran off at once.  If Lee could not get the estate out of debt, creditors would put liens on all the slaves.  Lee had renegades rounded up, punished (counter his feelings) and did indeed manage to manumit every one in 1862, while commanding an army.

            The South was outmanned 20 million to 5 million in white population and had few industries.  The Confederacy was doomed—unless Lee could trick the North into a decisive battle that would cripple their larger army.  That hope went down the drain at Gettysburg, July, 1863. “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.” When the end came in April 1865, Lee found a new duty to heal the country. “I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.” He was appointed President of Washington College in Lexington and started a campaign to reconcile the two sides with support of the 13^th Amendment. “While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a single day,” Lee wrote.

            Perhaps the greatest irony of Lee’s legacy is that he greatly opposed Confederate public memorials and statues being put up to commemorate the cause.  In 2017 USA saw two neo-facist groups vie in tearing down Lee’s statue at Chancellorsville. Obviously both had little knowledge whatsoever of the man or the issues in the Civil War. And likely too, clueless of his faith in God or the role he played in reconstruction, conferring with Pres. Grant 5 times at the White House. Only fools refuse to learn what has come before them.

Know your opponent, Live free or die

Understanding your opposition is vitally important in politics. The Left sees not just Trump but also all of his supporters as guilty of Racial and Religious hatred. It may not apply to Apathetic Joe Democrat, but what I am writing about certainly applies to their leaders.  Passion, hatred and fear of D’s toward Trump is genuine, even though it strikes many Americans as absurd.  No sooner was he elected than Lawrence Tribe and Maxine Waters wanted him impeached before he could take office.  Noah Millman called for a military coup.  Many others called for his removal on grounds of mental instability and the Asst. Attorney General volunteered to “wear a wire” to effect his 25^th Amendment removal. Yet many staunch conservatives thought Trump wasn’t that conservative. What was triggering Dems? They charged him with racism and white supremacy.  How did they come up with that?  Trump had said, trying to quell a riot, that there were ‘good’ people on both sides of the Charlottesville statue standoff.  This event is terribly important to D’s because it’s about as close to direct evidence as they can come up with.  Otherwise they have to insert motive into his talk. In actual fact socialist Jason Kessler of Occupy Wall Street fame organized “the right” in the Charlottesville standoff. It was staged!

      Yet it is more than Trump.  “There’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, “ Jamelle Bouje wrote in Slate. Just a rogue opinion?  Not exactly.  “bitter people who cling to their God and their guns, “ Obama stated telling why he hated R’s.  “Deplorables, racists, white nationalists, white supremacists”—that’s you and me that Dem Presidents and candidates are referring to.  “Christian fascists”, I was called on CNN one night.  What Dems claim contemptuously is that they think a guy like me lives to lock them in concentration camps. (What!?  I’d have to feed them and waste good land for the darned camps.)  But here’s the principle.  What they accuse us of being actually applies to themselves—psychological projection.  Calling Christians fascists will raise your dander.  I belong to the world’s largest Protestant denominational group which has more African brothers than N. America and Europe combined.  Did not my Lord and Savior say that “God so loved the world…that WHOSOEVER believes in Him shall not perish…” That “God would have ALL MEN to be saved…” “There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free…” And don’t I follow a Leader who just let people disagree with him and did nothing—didn’t call down fire from heaven or anything in His power. But it was Democrats—to the man—who tried to impeach without a proven crime, surveilled and lied to FISA court, leaked lies to the press, perjured before Congress.  What’s going on?  Were they just mad that their team lost in 2016? No. People will fight and die for their country or an ideology but not for the Rotary Club or the Wichita Wingnuts.

            Here’s what they are up to.  Read their historic narrative. Nehisi Coates wrote in Atlantic about the time of Trump’s inauguration that America has been racist since 1776 (now extended to 1619 by NY Times), that is, from the beginning.  Coates wasn’t impressed by Jefferson’s  “all men are created equal” because he was a slave-owner and it is known that the Constitution affirmed slavery.  Nor was the Civil Rights movement any big event, though it provided a neutral set of laws about race.  The Big deal was Obama’s election who constantly promised to “remake America”. Coates also repeated The Switch in which all Southern Democrats joined the Republicans and D’s became anti-racist in 1968.  Trump?  He was a usurper elected by racists and hated Christians. Of course, historians worldwide have choked on all aspects of this narrative.  Jefferson could not free his slaves because he was forever hopelessly in debt and creditors had put liens on his land and slaves.  But in 1782, right after Washington’s victory at Yorktown, he wrote of his hope for slavery’s demise.  The myth of the Constitution’s affirmation of slavery comes from Common Core written by leftists, borrowing, amazingly enough, from Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott (that runaway slaves had to be returned even if they made it to the North).  Lincoln was quick to debunk Taney’s out-of-thin-air claim and campaigned on it.  The 1787 Constitution actually forbid all slave importation and trade by 1807. 1619 was the year a storm-battered slave ship arrived at Jamestown and traded a few slaves to colonists in return for fixing their boat. The colonists were glad to send them on their way and treated the slaves like family.  The Switch ain’t so.  Af-Ams began to vote in large blocks for FDR’s handouts.  After WW II many Southerners had seen enough of the horrors of Japanese and German racism and came home with new attitudes.  That led to a crisis for the Dems who were about to lose the South.  LBJ came up with a game plan to win black vote like Tammany Hall (Dem machine in northern cities).  Trade giveaways for votes.  It was the modern version of the “Happy Slave” on the plantation who refuses to run away.  The Republican platform remains essentially unchanged over the years—The Grand Old Party. 

            Obama’s remake is an attempt to not just trick Af-Ams but all minorities into staying on the urban plantation. Party leaders (plantation owners), like Clintons and Obamas get filthy rich while doing little of substance for the minorities. This mimicks the Peron regime of Argentina which wrecked their economy by sucking businesses dry with socialist giveaways. Whites have little place in this dependency except to be poor or constantly  repent of their White Supremacy (which some do).  Trump has made inroads into the Caucasian and Christian vote and that is why he is their enemy.

            But in order to have their plantation, the Left has to obliterate Liberty which makes people think on their own.  Clearly the rioters who tear down monuments are not about racism, since they tear down statues of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln!  Their leadership is Marxist-socialist. The Dem platform is almost a carbon copy of Mussolini’s 1922 platform.  Yet, sneakily, they call themselves Anti-fa.  The absolute requirement to be a communist or fascist is to be anti-Christian.  Christianity, through John Locke, ‘father of modern psychology’, gave us the concepts of Liberty, Equality, Tolerance, Property Rights and universal Rights, that tells government to keep its hands off people’s lives.  Thnking people want limited government and the American Dream.  So what the Left fights for is the dissolution of the United States.  And this applies from moderate Dems who want a grab bag of changes in the Constitution to the Bernie Left who want it all gone. Know your opponent. Live free or die.

I love watching a BBC version of “House Hunters”, "Escape to the Country"—especially when the buyers use slang.  One guy, told a very favorable price, smiled and said, “That certainly put the cat among the pigeons.” Asked why she wanted to move out of London, an expecting  wife said, “I don’t want to be a mum in a flat.” (mother in an apartment)  Another couple wanted a home in the country to run “a holiday let or glamping.” (vacation rental/B&B and glamour camping like Americans do when they own an RV.) When a bedroom is big it is a “double” or small, a “single” and if there is no closet it needs a “bespoke wardrobe” (bespoke=’manufactured’. Means an armoire) 

But why the heck are there no new houses? The answer is what we will enjoy if Democrats take over and tax houses federally.  Building new means a big federal tax. So it is better to convert the barn or chicken house built in 1584. Plus the crown or state often owns the land thus you can’t fully own.  You pay Ground Rent to the queen or an earl or whomever owns the land.  The proclivities of Brits are humorous.  Houses come with ducks--doors only 4 ½ feet tall that even a small woman has to duck for. Many houses have 7 foot ceilings and only 5 or so windows—there was once a tax on number of windows.  All this adds up to a property market when country homes go for a national average of 300,000 pounds ($400,000) for a typical stucco-sided, thatched roof, 'front door opens on the sidewalk or street' abode.  Old houses had a boiler tank that was also hot water tank in the attic (no basements), often open air so rats could die in the water.  Thus faucets come in pairs.  Hot water is not potable, but cold is.  The only amenity is that the garden (yard) is green with their glorious climate.  Brits have little 13” TVs like we used to have and spend a lot of time growing flowers, reading books and driving under 5000 miles a year because they are poor. This and national healthcare that leaves everyone with bad teeth and a waiting list for a gall bladder operations is as the Dems aspire to.

William Wallace to Wycliff

You’ve probably seen Braveheart. How much of it is true? Let’s look at the characters.  Edward I, “Longshanks” because he was 6’2 in an era of men who were 5’5, was a terrific soldier and ambitious.  He was indeed the archetype cruel English oppressor.  Brutal and violent, he was autocratic and wanted all of Britain under his control.  Yet his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was very devoted and it kept him unusually (for that era) monogamous.  He conquered Wales and went to Crusade in the Holy Land where he was wounded with a poison dagger.  Eleanor had gone with him and tended him back to health by licking his wounds sucking out the poison.  She bore him at least 14 children. When she died in 1290 he was heartbroken.  Edward’s problem is that he needed big armies and in those feudal days, the only way to get one was when his vassal lords met their obligations of military service in return for their lands.  2^nd problem, how to pay the soldiers? Parliament kept denying the king funds.  So he would conquer and then plunder the conquered.  In Braveheart, Longshanks has devastated Scotland, killing her sons and raping her daughters. Historically these hideous abuses were by his underlings.  Longshanks sneakily took over Scotland.  Scottish King Alexander died in 1286 leaving infant Margaret as an only heir.  Edward used manipulation to betroth her to his son, who was only 5.  But the girl died.  Presenting himself as an honest broker, he convinced the Scottish lords that he would decide impartially who should be their king.  He put a puppet in place named John Balliol.  Balliol however, later decided to challenge Longshanks hence provoking war.  Balliol was defeated and several towns were massacred by Edward.  He put Scotland under direct English rule.

            The Scottish nobles piled heavy burdens on the backs of the commoners to pay for the war and weaseled to make a deal with Edward.  It was at this point that William Wallace stepped in, a lesser nobleman and farmer who had had enough.  He had a secret weapon, Highlanders.  Those were the tribal people who lived in the northern hills of Scotland. What did he tell them? We don’t know, but Braveheart’s words were romanticized by bards as the movie quotes: “And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that to come, and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” He was a brave man with a sufficient number of followers but armed only with pointed poles against knights.  They met, not on open field, as in the movie, but at Stirling Bridge, bottle-necking the force under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, from crossing the Forth River. More English tried to cross the open river and the Scots muscled them down.  The English retreated, and Wallace was crowned Guardian of the Kingdom. It didn’t last. Earl Surrey regrouped and defeated Wallace the next year at Falkirk in 1298.  Then Wallace’s army disbursed and he became a hunted man. Edward’s men found him in 1305, took him to London, executed and quartered him.  So brutal was his execution, and the Church protested.  Wallace was considered a good Christian.

            Thereupon the Scots became so angry, they rallied behind Robert VIII de Bruce, a man who actually did have some claim to the Scottish throne, but constantly wavered.  A year later, Longshanks died.  On his grave is the title, “Hammer of the Scots”.  He may have hammered them but he failed to crush them. Robert the Bruce went on to win the Scottish independence.  In the aftermath of Edward I’s brutal ruthlessness, Wallace became a martyr, England lost claim to Scotland, English finances were in ruin, the English nobles distrusted the monarchy, and Parliament established the precedent of no new law without their consent.  In the vacuum the English Church became more powerful, which led to resentment of the laity.   A young professor of theology, John Wycliff, began to find explosive ideas 150 years before the Reformation. God is sovereign over all and predestines men.  Man’s relationship to God is direct and requires no priest. Bread and wine are also present in the Mass. And he produced a clandestine Bible translation into English.  This rehearsal of the Reformation was protected by John of Gault and his anti-clerical party in Parliament. Even after Wycliff, England hungered for change, and was ready for Protestanism.