resonant | December Daily: Christmas dinner and jam for Frances

I had a thought and I put it on the top of the list so that if anybody comes up with brilliant ideas, I'll have time to put them into action: What Frances (of Hoban & Hoban's Bread and Jam for Frances) would eat for Christmas dinner, if she celebrated Christmas and for whatever totally not topical reason she found herself eating Christmas dinner alone.

One of my fannish friends once told me she was working on the best project ever: re-creating (and eating) the final lunch from Bread and Jam For Frances:

A thermos filled with cream of tomato soup, and a lobster salad sandwich on thin slices of white bread, and celery, carrot sticks, and black olives, and a little cardboard shaker of salt for the celery, and two plums, and a tiny basket of cherries, and vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles, and a spoon to eat it with.

(I remember we talked about how the serving sizes must have been very, very small, or else little badgers must have very, very big appetites.)

I'm going to be alone for Christmas, as I was for Thanksgiving; I just can't feel safe eating an indoor dinner with people who don't live with me. And my experience on Thanksgiving was that I really missed the hospitality of cooking an uncommon meal and eating it with uncommon ceremony.

(Who, being a grade-school-aged badger, probably doesn't make her own lunches, but never mind; in my head I can be both Frances and Frances' mother. And I have a big freezer for storing leftovers.)

Possibly Frances would have one piece each of both ham and turkey, and a teaspoon each of both gravy and cranberry sauce, and both stuffing and mashed potatoes, and a salad the size of a cupped hand, and about two mouthfuls each of two kinds of pie?

Possibly Frances would decide to go directly to the leftover stage and eat a ham and turkey sandwich with carrots and cucumbers and a very small orange and a ring of canned pineapple and a couple of pieces of this really delightful chocolate covered toffee that was an excellent early gift this year?

I welcome badger-inspired menu ideas!

Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.

20.

runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
21.

minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
22.

hypertwink - "21. Now that you've come back, is there a fandom that you want to dip your toe into? (Follow up: Are you apprehensive/excited about it?)"
23.

slvrbld47 -- "MCU, Tony lives through Endgame: Miraculously. As a Consequence, versions of Tony Stark are flung through the Multiverse, ending up in every Fandom. Including Your Favorites. Tony Stark is the new little black dress. I would love to see Tony Stark a werewolf in TeenWolf..."
24.

runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
25.

wychwood -- Favourite Due South secondary character?
26.

ride4ever - "for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020."
27.

reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"
28.
29.
30.
31.

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From:

ursula

Gingerbread badger with a Santa hat? Brussels sprouts cut in quarters? Hors d'oeuvres?

I have a reproduction first edition Joy of Cooking that I feel might be helpful here. There's a whole section on children's party favors that seems potentially appropriate (I remember the tiny candle in a candlestick made of a Lifesaver ring); let me know if you want me to investigate further.

From:

resonant

Aww, that sounds adorable. I have a book of kids' recipes that my mother bought from a museum fundraiser in the 70s, but unfortunately it's in the spousehouse; I could locate it in there eventually, but I doubt he could.

Don't want to put you to trouble but I am interested. Investigate precisely as much as is fun for you and no more!

From:

ursula

There is a clear winner in terms of combined adorableness and edibility:

Fig and Raisin Cat.

Two pulled figs joined with toothpicks, split almonds for ears, raisins on toothpicks for legs, icing for mouth and eyes, straws for whiskers and a ribbon bow around the neck.

There is a companion Fig and Raisin Man whose head is "a marshmallow partly dipped in chocolate."

From:

resonant

I wish there were a photo -- it sounds so cute. I had to look up "pulled figs," but apparently they're dried figs that have been shaped in a certain way.

From:

ursula

There's a drawing, but I think it's cuter than an ordinary human with ordinary icing skill could manage. You can see it here.

From:

resonant

My life is better for having seen that. Not enough better that I'm going to pipe with icing, mind you, or voluntarily put a fig in my mouth, but I'm very happy to have seen the picture.

From:

panisdead

About an egg cup's worth of butternut squash casserole: http://meljoulwan.com/2009/11/23/eat-your-vegetables-butternut-squash/

From:

resonant

That looks lovely and I have SO MUCH roasted csa squash in the freezer. Do you think i could substitute something for coconut oil and coconut milk rather than buy 15 ounces just to use a teaspoon?

From:

panisdead

Absolutely; my guess is butter and regular milk/half & half/cream would work fine as substitutes.

From:

desireearmfeldt

Wow...I read those books as a kid but I don't remember much about the food mentioned other than the bread and jam and hard boiled eggs. (Though now that you quote it, the cardboard shaker of salt kind of rings a bell.) I feel like the specific foods didn't make much impression on me at the time, but reading that quote now I'm suddenly struck that maybe that represents the food culture that would ostensibly be my cultural heritage (at least through one grandparent, but also the region my parents and I grew up in), except that my parents deliberately rejected it for a more urban, modern (they're at least a generation younger than Hoban), American-melting-pot-international food tradition.

From:

resonant

The Hobans were a decade older than my parents, but they were city folks, and my Mom's cooking has always been heavily farm-influenced. She's the oldest organic-granola foodie of my acquaintance.

When I read that passage now, one big reaction I have is "Baby, if you eat lobster salad that has been in a lunchbox in your desk for three hours, you will die." Maybe somehow warm mayo used to be safe?

From:

desireearmfeldt

Hm, I have the same reaction about the mayo, but on the other hand, tunafish sandwiches were totally a thing for a couple of generations, right? And mostly kids didn't die of food poisoning? (I'm in the "mayo is not food" camp and when I was a kid, I was also in the "fish is not food" camp, so no tuna sandwiches in my lunchbox. But I'm pretty sure it was a thing!)

A few years ago, I directed a production of The Importance Of Being Earnest, which features a lot of food on stage, including cucumber sandwiches. My props person felt that verisimilitude was important, and wanted to make real cucumber sandwiches with mayonnaise. Which I'm pretty sure is not what Victorian English people put on their cucumber sandwiches, and in any case, I'm in camp "if the audience isn't going to see it, let's prioritize logistical convenience over authenticity," but mostly I was just like "please, let's not food poison the actors!" (And then the actor who had to eat them weighed in with "also, I don't eat mayo, could we maybe substitute something else?")

From:

resonant

I feel sure that butter would be the traditional spread for a cucumber sandwich!

Did you notice that a few years ago suddenly it became unsafe to eat uncooked flour? Like I've been reading lady magazines for many decades and until maybe 2015 I never, ever saw a warning about not eating raw cookie dough because of the FLOUR -- in my childhood it was because raw eggs weren't considered safe.

So maybe if you go far enough back, even the eggs used in mayonnaise aren't a significant salmonella risk.

(Any time stuff like this happens, my reaction is always "So somebody managed to get a food-safety regulation repealed, huh?")

From:

desireearmfeldt

Oh, actually, yes, I don't know the exact history of salmonella, but I have the impression it became more of a problem as farming got more industrial, so that actually might well have not been so much of a risk in our*/our parents' childhood as it is now (or, was 20 years ago? possibly it's declined again since?).

However, the internet seems to think that commercial mayonnaise is actually acidic enough to not only not grow bacteria but even perhaps kill salmonella in the fish or whatever it's mixed with:
https://www.thespruceeats.com/mayonnaise-spoilage-myths-and-safety-1808083

And I bet approximately no one makes homemade mayo for their kids' lunchbox.

*[From things you've posted, I think you're about 10 years older than I am. I was born almost exactly at the end of the Nixon presidency.]

From:

resonant

Looks like precisely 10 years -- I was born in 1964. The end of the Nixon presidency is my first political memory, which may explain a lot about my politics.

From:

laurenthemself

I was in a production of Men at Arms, adapted from the Terry Pratchett book, and we used meringue for mashed potatoes, glued to the plate, because nobody was actually going to eat it. By the end of the week there were ants in it, and on the final night our Vimes actually put a spoonful of it in his mouth.

I was Sybil. It broke me.

From:

desireearmfeldt

:)!

From:

resonant

That's how Sybil feels about a lot of the things Sam eats.

From:

princessofgeeks

I HEART FRANCES THIS MUCH AND I WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETTER.

Frances and Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel are my favorite children's books of all time.

From:

resonant

It's so hard to believe that Riddley Walker and Bread and Jam for Frances both came out of the same mind!

From:

desireearmfeldt

Srsly.

From:

mific

I'm a fan of Riddley Walker but have never read the Frances books. Will remedy that!

From:

resonant

I've just discovered that there's an annotated ebook of Ridley Walker, so I may need to re-read it this year.

From:

jesse_the_k

Ooooo -- annotated!

There's several badger-setts-worth of digging at this fan site https://www.russellhoban.org/title/riddley-walker

From:

superborb

That cardboard shaker of salt reminds me of the puzzlement I felt as a child reading about someone carrying a bit of salt in a twist of paper for their lunch. I never seasoned anything with just salt and was so confused!

From:

resonant

I don't eat raw celery, but the other use of salt in the book is on a hard-boiled egg, and you certainly need salt to make a hard-boiled egg palatable.

Even as a kid, I remember being puzzled by the cardboard shaker, though -- I wonder if it was something you bought in the store, or something that the moms of the 1960s knew how to make?

From:

superborb

IIRC, the use of the salt in the book I read was for an egg. But I've never felt that a hard boiled egg needed salt, so...

From:

lunabee34

Oh this is adorable! You must have a perfect wee radish.

From:

resonant

That's precisely the spirit of the thing! [Puts it on the list]

From:

laurenthemself

Other things that Frances has been known to eat, according to the books I've got:

Oatmeal with banana (she prefers raisins, but had eaten them all); a box of prunes and five chocolate biscuits; chocolate cake (A Baby Sister for Frances)
Bubblegum balls; gum drops; chocolate-covered peanuts; presumably some of Gloria's birthday cake (A Birthday for Frances)
Chocolate sandwich cookies; a picnic lunch for herself and Gloria made up of hard-boiled eggs, whole fresh tomatoes, carrot and celery sticks, cream cheese-and-chives sandwiches, cream cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, salami-and egg sandwiches, pepper-and-egg sandwiches, coleslaw, potato chips, ice-cold root beer packed in ice, with watermelon and strawberries and cream for dessert; also black and green olives, pickles, iced lollies, pretzels 'and things like that', and they have the salt and pepper shakers again (Best Friends for Frances)
A glass of milk (Bedtime for Frances)
Bubblegum (A Bargain for Frances)
Eggs, jelly beans, chocolate and vanilla sandwich cookies, chocolate, hot dogsoatmeal with raisins again, poached eggs on toast, orange juice, hot chocolate with whipped cream (Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs)

From:

desireearmfeldt

Lorna Doones!

From:

resonant

Nothing ever again sounds as delicious as the food in books you read when you were very small.

Like nothing I've ever eaten tastes as good as Bugs Bunny's carrots sound.

From:

katherine

Now I'm also puzzled about the little cardboard salt shaker...

EBay informs me there were teeny salt shakers that advertised Quaker Oil for some reason:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1960s-QUAKER-STATE-MINIATURE-SALT-SHAKER-CANS-Jobbers-CAT-SELL-SHEET-/192886391057

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Miniature-Quaker-State-Motor-Oil-Can-4oz-Salt-Shaker-FULL-Advertising/254208116447

From:

resonant

That is odd and fascinating!

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