Friday Video: Cooking 101 for the 20th century

Loretta reports:

Someone recently told me that the height of gourmet dining early in his adult life was Trout Almondine, and that reminded me of going to fancy restaurants decades ago, where it did indeed star on the menu.

Most of what’s in the film is strange to me, but then, I did grow up in an immigrant household, in New England, and wasn’t exposed to much of the food that my husband, for instance, grew up with in the South. Of course, watching some of our cooking shows today, the people in the film likely would have been equally puzzled.

I wonder how many of these food ideas traveled from Britain to the U.S. or vice versa. I also wonder how many of us dress to cook in the style of the woman in the first segment. But I do lust for her jewelry. And her dress. And the mid-century dishware.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

An Early Sampler from Salem, MA, 1673

Isabella reporting,

Here's another sampler from the exhibition Embroidery: The Language of Art, currently on display at Winterthur Museum. This one, too, doesn't fallow into traditional notions of what a sampler should be.

Most Americans today think of 17thc New England as a mythical Pilgrim-Land, where everyone is dressed in black with buckles on their hats, barely scraping out an existence in the new land before they finally erupt into the paranoia and persecution of the witch trials. It's seen as a grim, forbidding place where it's always winter, and it's more than a little scary.

Yes, the first years of the Massachusetts Bay Company were grim. But by the middle of the century, life was growing more comfortable. Many of the settlers in the Boston area were prospering, and actively trading by ship with London, and therefore with the rest of the world. The silk thread for this sampler likely came in one of those ships, and it could have come to a Boston or Salem shop from silk manufacturers in France, Italy, or even China. Even those north American colonies were already part of a global economy.

This sampler was made fifty years after the first Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and twenty years before the infamous witch trials. Sarah Collins, the young woman who made the sampler, signed and dated her work in the bottom rows of letters.  She lived in Salem, a coastal town about twenty miles outside of Boston with a good harbor, and she must have belonged to one of the families that was benefiting from this shipping trade. Clearly she wasn't required to work all day in the fields or preparing food for her family's sustenance, as girls might have done earlier in the colony's history. Instead she had sufficient time to devote to learning elegant, decorative needlework like this, and she was likely encouraged to do so as a sign not only her own skill, but as proof of her family's gentility.

The stitches and patterns are traditional designs that, once learned, could be employed in different ways. Letters and numbers would have been used to mark linens, shifts, and shirts, while the floral designs could embellish both clothing and household linens. Most of the sampler is worked in cross stitch, although there are some more linear stitches used as well. (Compare these geometrically-inspired designs with the more free-flowing flowers of the needle lace sampler I posted earlier from the 1790s.) Though faded with time, the colors would once have been rich and vibrant, and their selection would have been an integral part of Sarah's creation.

What impressed me the most, however, is not only Sarah's skill at needlework and design, but also the extraordinary tidiness of her work. The sampler is displayed sandwiched between two sheets of Plexiglas so that both sides are visible. If it weren't for the letters being backwards and the colors of the thread being brighter on the reverse (shown above right), it would be impossible to tell the right from the wrong side of the sampler. For Sarah, Puritan Massachusetts wasn't necessarily gloomy, but a place that included flowers, colors, and gleaming silk on fine linen - and beautiful embroidery.

Winterthur will be hosting a needlework conference in connection with this exhibition on October 14-15, 2016. Entitled Embroidery: The Language of Art, the conference speakers will include international experts on needlework as well as hands-on workshops in the needle arts. Click here for the conference brochure for more information.

Sampler, worked by Sarah Collins, 1673. Winterthur Museum. Photographs copyright Winterthur Museum.

Fashions for October 1898

1898 suits

Loretta reports:

It appears that 1898 continued a change in fashion begun in 1897, when the huge leg o’ mutton sleeves disappeared, along with clashing colors. C. C. Willett Cunnington, in English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century tells us:

“The new conception was that the dress should be fluffy and frilly, undulating in movement with ripples of soft foam appearing at the feet; colours harmonizing with each other, surfaces broken with flimsy trimmings and revealing submerged depths of tone. The softened outlines, willowy and slender, created the illusion that these aery habitations must be occupied by beings composed of stuff less solid than flesh and blood.  ... This style survived well into the present [20th] century and during the last years of the nineteenth century did not arrive at its maturity.”

1898 visiting dresses

According to the book, “The emancipatory movement associated with the nickname ‘the New Woman’” along with the personal freedom the bicycle offered women, explains the change. “The alarm created by such innovations created, as it usually does, an apparent swing-back to the ultra-feminine in fashion. By such devices the pace of progress is seemingly checked and the male sex reassured. After a stride forward woman will affect to mark time by a return to fluffiness.”

1898 fashion description

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

A Beautiful Needle Lace Sampler, 1795

Isabella reporting,

Last week I visited one of my favorite places, Winterthur Museum, and among the current exhibitions is Embroidery: The Language of Art. Our readers know that embroidery is one of my absolute favorite things, and this exhibition had plenty of examples to make me ooh and ahh.

For most modern people, the word "sampler" means cross-stitched letters and designs. It can be that, yes, but a sampler can also feature all kinds of needlework, from decorative stitching to darning stitches and even the so-called plain stitches used to construct clothing and household goods. Most samplers were worked by schoolgirls as they learned the various stitches. Not only were the samplers an educational tool, but they could become a kind of record of stitches for future projects. If a sampler was decorative as well, then it could also be proudly displayed by the girl's family as proof of her newly-acquired expertise.

The identity of this sampler's maker is now sadly lost beyond her initials, but her exquisite workmanship remains. Worked in a school in the Philadelphia area, the sampler features both traditional embroidery stitches and needle lace to create a stylized basket of flowers, a motif popular with embroiderers in many different cultures. The sampler is worked in silk thread on linen. (As always, please click on the images to enlarge them.)

Needle lace, sometimes called Dresden work, involves cutting or drawing away parts of the supporting fabric and then using the needle to weave elaborate patterns to fill in the empty spaces. This example must have required phenomenal skill and patience from its young maker. The needle lace sections are done with very tiny stitches - the geometric circles shown in the details are only about 1-1/2" in diameter. (The pink backing is modern to provide contrast.)

Yet there's an unmistakable exuberance and joy to the design as well. Too often fine embroidery seems like drudgery to 21st century eyes, but a piece like this is clearly as much an expression of the young needleworker's imagination as a painting might have been. You can see her enjoyment in her design and her pride in the precision of her stitches. How fortunate her work has survived so we can enjoy it, too!

Winterthur will be hosting a needlework conference in connection with this exhibition on October 14-15, 2016. Entitled Embroidery: The Language of Art, the conference speakers will include international experts on needlework as well as hands-on workshops in the needle arts. Click here for the conference brochure for more information.

Above: Sampler, by "M.S.", worked in the Delaware Valley, 1795. Winterthur Museum.

Breakfast Links: Week of September 26, 2016

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• The amazing 19thc butter sculptures of Caroline S. Brooks.
• A humble skirt worn by an enslaved child finds a place in history.
• The mystery of the phantom page-turner.
• Native American captive Elizabeth Hanson,  a Quaker mother in 1724 New England.
• Explore all the treasures of the Red Drawing Room at Blenheim Palace in 360 degrees.
• Skeleton of a teenaged girl confirms cannibalism at Jamestown.
• Image: Gold leaf on Coptic shoes, making a fashion statement while strutting the streets of ancient Egypt.
• Fingerspitzenformer, otherwise known as a late 19thc fingertip shaper. Really.
• Danger and the amorous woman: prostitution in 19thc Britain.
• An inspired pot.
• Many questions from the title alone of this 1892 advice book to read online: "How to Get Married Although a Woman, or, The Art of Pleasing Men" by a Young Widow.
• Image: Enchanting c1915 autochrome portrait of a lady happily surrounded by her books.
• Inside the old-fashioned world of New York's vintage girls.
• Benjamin Franklin's silver court sword is coming up for auction.
• Why John Hancock's signature was so big and other hands FAQs about the Declaration of Independence.
• Image: Bonnie Prince Charlie's stunning silver-hilted broadsword, found on the battlefield after the defeat at Culloden.
• Domestic and imported woolen cloth in a medieval town.
• The Wolf's Water, coming from a historic London pump.
• Queen's House, Tower of London: the most complete high-status, timber-framed building in London that predates the Great Fire of 1666.
• The Countess Greffulhe, Proust's fashion queen, reigns again in a new exhibition.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.