How are you doing, is everything good? I hope so. Today is about food, and specifically about borrowed/stolen recipes.
It’s only right to kick off with the grandmother of stolen recipes; Isabella Beeton, of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management fame. She did the food column for a magazine her husband ran in the 1860s, where she encouraged readers to write in with their recipes and then just printed the ones she liked the sound of. She also did the monster job of compiling them all into a 1,000+ page book, which it sounds like she did not enjoy particularly:
I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.
You can see the entire text of the book here; please let me know if you cook anything from it and if you would like to be featured in a future Fem Friday with the results of your experimentation:
I also greatly enjoyed this article about how so many "family secret" recipes are actually cribbed from the sides of e.g. stock cube packets:
When my husband and I first got together, he talked wistfully of his grandmother’s cake. She was 90+ and living on the other side of the country, so on my urging, he would ask her to send him the recipe. She never got around to it. Over the years, I tried dozens of recipes—using fresh Meyer Lemons that we grew ourselves! He would try them and say, “Well, it’s delicious, but not what I remember from my childhood.” Finally, we happened to visit the East Coast in the final year of Grandma’s long life. We went to visit her at her home. Joe brought up the cake. She whacked her knee and exclaimed in her thick Jersey-and-cigarettes voice: “Oh Joey! That WAS a great cake! I got it off the box of Betty Crockah. Lemon Poke Cake. I’ll find it for you.”
Finally, it would be remiss of me to talk about borrowed recipes without showing you my own favourite borrowed recipe, from a cook book that a friend’s father’s workplace produced. (thanks for the photo, friend!) Please note that this is an English workplace and not an English dish so there is clearly a great deal of borrowing going on here too. It’s the meal I default to whenever I am tired and don’t know what to cook, and it’s also the best thing I make. I hope you enjoy it too:
I hope you had a great International Women’s day, celebrating the achievements of all the top international women. In today’s Fem Friday, we’re going to be looking at the contribution of females on a much smaller scale, i.e., that of the insect world! If you don’t like insects very much, firstly there aren’t any horrible pictures of them under the links, and secondly I hope this newsletter brings you round, even a little, to our six-legged friends.
Let’s start with ants. If you’ve been looking for a strong female role model, you could do a lot worse than ants as they can carry up to fifty times their own body weight. There is also a constant power struggle between the queen and the female workers about what the gender balance of the colony should be. This is fascinating:
The root of the power struggle between queens and workers results from the different interests they have in raising new members of the colony. Both – as a result of evolutionary pressures – are interested in ensuring the survival of their genes. The queen does this by producing new queens and male drones to mate with those queens, which will create new colonies. But males, which die after mating, are of no use to the female workers.
Of course, this was always going to cover bees, they gave us the phrase “queen bee”. Here’s a review of a book about how we have used bees to model our worlds and the mistakes we made along the way. The author of this book is Bee Wilson (a woman) so lots of bee coverage here today. Bees:
Most amusingly, this is seen in the long-mistaken gender of the queen bee. The idea of a king bee goes back to Greek and Roman times. Most looked at the hive, saw a large bee in charge, assumed it was stronger and more able than other bees, and drew the inference of a master bee. This all seemed perfectly logical until the invention of the microscope revealed an awkwardness: female genitalia. The news was hard for some to take. One English clergyman and apiarist insisted in 1744 that the queen must be a virgin. It was too scandalous to imagine she might have sex with the males in the hive as if she were “a base, notorious, impudent strumpet […] with gallants by the hundreds”.
Finally, I thought of this theme because I encountered this completely lovely blog, by a woman beekeeper in Ealing. I forget what I was searching for but the post I landed on was about walking through London and looking at all of the non-human life there and feeling happy that it was spring. A delightful activity for all ages to read about and do. Here’s a post about myths, snowdrops and the promises of spring for you:
he flower means consolation and promise. In another legend, Kerma, finding her lover dead, plucked a snowdrop and placed it on his wounds. It did not rouse him, but at the touch his flesh changed to snowdrops, hence the flower is also an emblem of death. Even now in rural England the flower is in ill repute, and it is unlucky to carry the first spray of the season into the house […] I’m glad the legend discourages bringing snowdrops into the house as they are much more valuable for the bees. And with snowdrops blowing in the fresh February air, let’s hope their promise comes true soon.
A week ago I went to a public lecture by Anne Enright, and this week it’s written up in the LRB. I loved it and have taken it as my theme for Fem Friday so that you can enjoy it as well.
It was called “Adam And Eve: The Genesis of Blame”, and I’d thought it might have had a blunt anti-Bible message, but in fact it had a blunt anti-misogyny message which I enjoyed a great deal. Before you read it, though, take some time to drink in this amazing image Anne Enright put up onscreen, of God creating Eve from Adam's rib:
Neither fusion nor repetition can hold together this expanding sequence of separations. It ends in estrangement, of God from mankind, man from woman; of flesh from flesh and bone from bone. And so it comes, the final act of distinction which happens when he turns and blames. Not me. Her.
It might have been seen as a story about human betrayal.
This made me think about Margaret Fell, Quaker and early feminist, who argued for women participating fully in the life of the church in terms that her audience would have understood and found hard to argue with:
But when Eve tells God the truth about the temptation and confesses her sin, God passes sentence on the Serpent: “I will put enmity between thee and the Woman,” he says, “and between thy Seed and her Seed”. In Fell's view, these words foretell the special role that women would play in the restoration of humankind. The “Seed of the Woman” refers to Christ himself, who is the Son of God “made of a woman”, the Virgin Mary. Those who prevent the Seed (or the inner light) of the Woman from speaking, Fell says, prevent the message of Christ.
Unrelated to Genesis, but related to faith and beginnings and women's words; I recently read a book that mentioned “the woman who wrote the book of Hebrews“. And I thought, okay, for sure someone is being trolled here, and it for sure isn’t me, but this is worth a quick search. Anyway, the theory is that Priscilla, who you might know from the book of Acts, wrote Hebrews! I like that at least a part of this argument is that she reps for other women:
Hoppin notes that all the women mentioned in Hebrews are envisioned as exemplars of faith with more emphasis than the Hebrew Bible pictured these heroines in the initial rendition of their stories. “Perhaps this is what we should add to the author’s psychological profile: generosity in evaluating the spiritual role of Sarah in her nation’s history – seeing her intrinsic faithfulness instead of her momentary confusion and disbelief”
Here’s a memory for you from my university days; someone had left a guide to a paper they were doing lying around in the library, that (as these things do) broke down week by week what they should read and what they should expect from the seminar every week. Anyway, there wasn’t a seminar in one week, but the way the lecturer chose to express this was WEEK SIX: Silent Contemplation of Mysteries. Silent contemplation of mysteries! So lovely. I use this phrase to myself very often.
Obviously, that was also a way of the lecturer saying “I won’t have anything for you this week”, and similarly, I don’t really have a big theme for you today, so here instead are some things that you might enjoy contemplating silently.
We start with a poem by Mary Oliver, that I have returned to again and again since reading it:
Don't Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Here’s some more about Mary Oliver, if you loved that as much as I do:
Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting.
Here’s something that you might contemplate more often you enjoy; embarrassing things that you have done. I have been doing this so much less since reading this lovely sentence from Nicole Cliffe. Have a lovely Friday free from angst about whatever it was that you did that time:
I remember every single embarrassing thing I have ever done, but if you asked me to recall embarrassing things I have witnessed, I would be hard-pressed to do so.
Finally, Sarah Chevallier has done some excellent contemplation on the topic; what if the men of literature were on Tinder? I implore you to click this link:
Name: Odysseus
Age: 38
Occupation: King of Ithaca who is 100% NOT having a midlife crisis
I hope you had a great Galentine’s day, however you chose to celebrate it!
The email is not about Galentine’s day though, it’s inspired by the book I’m reading now, The Tale Of Genji. This is a solid candidate for the first novel ever written, and it was written by Lady Murasaki, a lady. She was also a lady who knew Sei Shonagon, author of The Pillow Book, although if you think this might be a segue to an inspiring tale of Heian period sestrahood; no:
The two women knew one another well enough for Lady Murasaki to criticize Sei Shonagon in her own dairy for being frivolous in her impulse "to sample each interesting thing that comes along," and overly self-satisfied in her Chinese compositions, that are "full of imperfections."
Having celebrated these two literary innovators, let’s turn our attention to the thousand years thereafter with two short stories I can highly recommend to you.
You may have read Naomi Alderman’s enjoyable novel The Power, and may (like me) have enjoyed the way she treated faith and religious power in that novel. If so, you will delight in this story she wrote about the prophet Elijah:
On the first night of Passover, the Prophet Elijah came to the house of Mr and Mrs Rosenbaum in Finchley Lane, Hendon. Mrs Rosenbaum had opened the door as usual, after supper, at the point in the evening when one is supposed to anticipate the arrival of the Prophet Elijah, whose appearance will herald the beginning of the Messianic Age. Mr Rosenbaum, standing at the long dining table, began to recite the verses that accompany this moment: ‘Pour out thy wrath upon the nations who know you not,’ he declared.
Longtime friend of Fem Fri, Ellis Saxey, also writes about power (but also startups!) in this excellent short story. The end of this one haunts me. Enjoy:
Julian, the CEO, looms too large for the tiny office room. I look at his forehead, to avoid his intense eyes without seeming shifty, but end up mesmerised by the sheen on his slicked-back dark hair. “Thanks for coming, Dilawar,” he says, and enfolds my hand in his, and I really feel like he means it. Posh boys are good at sounding sincere.
Here are some links about women who did awesome and innovative things with computers and the culture around them. Enjoy!
We start with the interesting and not entirely happy story of Joan Ball, the woman who was the first to create a computer dating program. She also – and this is the more interesting bit to me – found a better way of matching people even before then, finding that what people say they don’t want is much more important than what they say they want. I’d never thought of the latter as having a lot more flex than the former, but it makes sense:
She needed help bringing people together in a logical way, at a large scale, so that they could go off and do illogical things at a small scale. She needed to balance the personal and the impersonal, the rational and the romantic, in order to make it work. So she started asking people to write down what they didn't want—this time in a more rigid format that could be quantified. The rest, after all, remained negotiable. Despite the idea that computer dating was somehow “revolutionary” or only for the young, it was divorcees, widowers, and older unmarried people who mostly answered her call.
You know how I love to feature obituaries in Fem Fri, and this is a good one – Mary Berners-Lee, who made an unfair system work for her and other women to such a massive extent that it feels like a challenge:
The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world’s first freelance programmers.
I hope you are excited for some links about textiles this morning! Textiles are awesome because they are a traditionally feminine craft that can be and have been subverted all over the shop for a wide range of reasons.
We start with Elizabeth Parker’s sampler, which you can go and see in the V&A. The first time I went to the V&A Saxey took me to see this, and it has haunted me ever since; a woman tells about her unhappy life and her despair in this tiny, detailed cross stitch which just stops at the point when you really want to know what happens next:
Her life then changed forever as she left home to enter service as a nurserymaid. She describes what she sees as her own weaknesses and sins, and the trials she had to face from employers who treated her 'with cruelty too horrible to mention', in this deeply personal confession of her temptation to suicide. As the text continues her desperation increases, '..which way can I turn oh whither must I flee to find the Lord wretch wretch that I am …what will become of me ah me what will become of me'.
Hannah Ryggen turned to tapestry because it is so much more transportable – and hence more useful in a revolution – than a painting is. She did not shy away from showing brutal murders and/or Mussolini's corpse, either. There is a show of her work on in Oxford right now, so if you want to go and see it, you can before Feb 18th! Be sure to let me know what you think, if you do:
Her turn to tapestry, and with it, her interest in craft traditions and the eccentric compositions of medieval art, was explicitly political. A tapestry was a mobile messenger: it could be nimbly rolled up, transported and displayed without sustaining damage as a painting might.
Finally, less political but no less awesome, please enjoy Mel Bartheidel’s beautiful, detailed CMYK and greyscale embroidery. There’s much more detailed and impressive work on her instagram, so I advise you to click through – but I love this test stripe:
Today’s Fem Friday is inspired by Ursula Le Guin, which in practical terms means it’s about the intersection of science and creativity.
Let’s start with a tribute to this amazing woman, who wrote more than 50 books. Unfortunately she is not this week’s Economist obituary so WARNING WARNING, this link contains some Neil Gaiman self-aggrandisment #content:
A pioneering feminist, Le Guin pushed at boundaries in both her writing and her campaigning. In a famous letter in 1987, she declined to write a blurb for an anthology containing no writing by women, saying that the tone of it “is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club or a locker room”, ending: “Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.”
I, and at least one other subscriber, had a cry at her poem in the excellent newsletter Pome this week. It’s very lovely, perhaps you’d like to cry at it as well:
from Finding My Elegy
My elegy, your clothes are out of fashion.
I see you walking past me on a country road
in a worn cloak. Your steps are slow, along
a way that grows obscure as it leads back and back.
In dusk some stars shine small and clear as tears
on a dark face that is not human. I will follow you.
One thing that’s always nice to see is responses to fan letters, and there’s lots to enjoy in this one from Ursula Le Guin to Janelle Shane. I particularly like the bracketed “Today’s Advice”, as though Le Guin gave one piece of advice per day and it was Janelle’s luck that her letter was in the right place at the right time.
Janelle Shane does her own interesting things at the intersection of science and creativity, training neural nets to do weird and funny things. I’m linking here to the program that generates first lines of novels, but there is lots to read on this fun blog:
it developed a curious fondness for a line by Jacqueline Carey about not being a cuckoo’s child. Everything, for some reason, was a cuckoo’s child.
Let’s talk about being teenagers! Or rather, let’s talk about how easy it is to revert to the patterns of teenage life, even when you are objectively an adult with adult emotional responses.
Firstly, enjoy this lovely article (by a woman) about The National (not women) – it’s also about the obsessive love that grows around bands, when you are a teenager and also when you are not:
I had never loved a band like I loved this band, and the truth is I never really have since. I acknowledge that quite a lot of music is better than the National, more accomplished, more important, more coherent, and less embarrassing. But we rarely love things for reasons that aren’t embarrassing.
Speaking of music, I feel personally picked on by this Reductress article about a music taste that is basically trapped in college/2008/amber. It namechecks a remarkable number of my favourite songs, bands and albums. None of whom are Panic! At The Disco by the way:
She also credits the releases of Justin Timberlake’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds in 2006, and TPain’s “Epiphany” in 2007 with her continued musical curiosity. “Then ‘Tha Carter III’ came out in 2008”, she said. “It was all over for me then.”
Finally, a key feature as I remember it of teenage life is staring at pictures of men looking pouty and hot. There is no shortage of these on the internet, but if you are looking for an aggregator, the feminist hero behind totallywould dot wordpress dot com has been doing this for seven years. She’s also been proactively going through her archives recently so you can be sure you aren’t looking at a picture of a confirmed harasser. FEMINIST HERO, like I said. Enjoy. Happy Friday.
You know what I’ve not convered recently, it’s maths, and specifically in the case of today, geometry.
We start with a real mathematician, Margherita Beloch. She was the first [NB person not woman] to formalise an origami move which allows, when possible, to construct by paper folding the common tangents to two parabolas. As a consequence she showed how to extract cubic roots by paper folding something that is impossible to do by rule and compass. I love this because it's a physical way of answering an abstract question:
I’m not above featuring cakes on Fem Fri, and today is such a day – enjoy the beautiful mathematical cakes of architect Dinara Kasko. I really like the low res cake (third down in the main article) although as it also looks like it’s made of packing foam it’s not the one I’m choosing to feature here:
Employing algorithmic tools and complex diagramming techniques, Kasko is able to design and fabricate cakes aesthetically reminiscent of 3D graphs, geometric models, and avant-garde sculptures. In order to perfect her craft and produce a diverse collection of cakes, Kasko teams up with an eclectic range of professionals, including mathematicians, scientists, and sculptors.
Finally, please tolerate me in my yearly tradition of posting something that I wrote; it’s my review of books from 2017 and I was pleased with this visualisation:What I forgot was how many good — enjoyable, interesting, funny — books you read when you read a lot, and how many connections you find between those enjoyable and interesting and funny works. In the most part without being defined “projects”, my reading started to cluster around themes with (as seen below) Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Catherine Merridale’s Lenin On The Train acting as central points
Her life then changed forever as she left home to enter service as a nurserymaid. She describes what she sees as her own weaknesses and sins, and the trials she had to face from employers who treated her 'with cruelty too horrible to mention', in this deeply personal confession of her temptation to suicide. As the text continues her desperation increases, '..which way can I turn oh whither must I flee to find the Lord wretch wretch that I am …what will become of me ah me what will become of me'.
Her turn to tapestry, and with it, her interest in craft traditions and the eccentric compositions of medieval art, was explicitly political. A tapestry was a mobile messenger: it could be nimbly rolled up, transported and displayed without sustaining damage as a painting might.
Employing algorithmic tools and complex diagramming techniques, Kasko is able to design and fabricate cakes aesthetically reminiscent of 3D graphs, geometric models, and avant-garde sculptures. In order to perfect her craft and produce a diverse collection of cakes, Kasko teams up with an eclectic range of professionals, including mathematicians, scientists, and sculptors.
What I forgot was how many good — enjoyable, interesting, funny — books you read when you read a lot, and how many connections you find between those enjoyable and interesting and funny works. In the most part without being defined “projects”, my reading started to cluster around themes with (as seen below) Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Catherine Merridale’s Lenin On The Train acting as central points