Good food, and lots of it, in a historic setting – times two

I suppose you might be wondering what on earth an old postcard showing the Cunard ocean liner Ascania has to do with life here at the Manse in Queensborough. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s all about the food.

Along with my love for vintage cookbooks, I have a soft spot for vintage menus. I’ve got a small but interesting collection of them: bills of fare from long-gone midcentury restaurants in various parts of North America, and also menus that were handed out to passengers in the glory days of air and ocean-liner travel, when elegant dining was considered to be an integral part of the excitement of long-distance voyages. I love poring over these menus, imagining the people who once held them to ponder their selection for “luncheon” or dinner. I love the reminders of how things used to be when people dined out, like how it was once common for a glass of tomato juice to be served as an appetizer. I love the way the restaurants, and especially the cruise lines and airlines, did their best to make everything sound so refined and fancy. And I love the vintage prices!

My latest addition to the collection came from an antiques warehouse in the pretty village of Orono, which is a drive of about an hour and three-quarters from Queensborough on the way to Toronto. Orono has done a fabulous job of turning itself into a destination for visitors, with nice restaurants and pretty shops, many of them focused on antiques. In one of those shops this past Saturday, I spotted this delightful image in a boxful of stuff:

Because it said “Cunard” on the front, I guessed, correctly, that it was the cover of a long-ago menu from that venerable British luxury cruise line. And here’s that menu, from 62 years ago:

Isn’t it lovely? Sounds like some pretty nice gastronomic offerings there on the R.M.S. Ascania, though I’m not too sure what “Home-made Brawn” is, and I’m not entirely sure I want to know. Also, I wonder what “Colonial” cheese is. Maybe it’s the very cheddar that our own Hastings County has specialized in making for more than a century and a half – Canada being, of course, “the colonies” in the eyes of British steamship owners in 1954.

I have subsequently learned that I was on the mark in finding the offerings of the Ascania menu appetizing. How do I know this? Because of this interesting discovery that the internet turned up! It’s the flip side of the colour postcard of the Ascania featured at the top of this post:

Note how Jack writes from on board, as the ship is passing Newfoundland and Labrador en route to Montreal, “The boat is very overcrowded but oh Elsie such good food – it makes my heart ache each time I sit down to a meal.” Isn’t that lovely? One can’t read the year on the postmark, but I suspect the card was sent in the years after the Second World War, when England was still suffering from food shortages that would have made the offerings of the Ascania look sumptuous indeed.

Here, from the website of the London Telegraph, is more evidence that the shipboard food was much appreciated: a lovely memoir by a chap named Cyril Collie of emigrating from England to Canada on board the Ascania in February 1952. He reports, in part:

“The Ascania was not a luxury liner but to me it was first class all the way. I shared a stuffy inside cabin with three other young men, two of whom spoke very little English. Along with many others on board they were refugees who had survived the holocaust and were seeking a new life in Canada.

“Britain at that time was still a country of shortages and rationing and I’d known little else since age 11 when the war had started. There were no such conditions on the Ascania. It was as though we entered another world.

“The food was excellent, plentiful and we could order anything we wanted. Any amount of liquor, chocolates and cigarettes could be purchased at tax free prices. Overnight we went from a world of austerity to a haven of abundance.”

I wondered if there was any way to find out where exactly the Ascania had been on the day my luncheon menu was handed out to its passengers – Wednesday, March 17, 1954. I didn’t find that, but I did discover from various sites, including this one and this one, that at the time the Ascania sailed the route between Liverpool and Montreal – and that in 1957, only three years after that menu was printed, the ship was decommissioned and destroyed.

So that’s a lot of history learned thanks to one luncheon menu!

And now, while I have your attention and we’re talking about food, let’s turn to your opportunity to eat very well in historic surroundings. Not a vintage Cunard ocean liner, granted, but the homey and historic setting of the Queensborough Community Centre, our village’s former one-room schoolhouse. Here are the details:

That would be this coming Sunday, people, and you don’t want to miss it. Not only is the food good and plentiful, but the company – your neighbours and friends, whether you’ve known them all your life or have just met them – is second to none. And as an added bonus, this year you get to admire a fantastic bit of renovation that’s just been completed: the schoolhouse’s classic original tin ceiling has been freshly painted, and looks wonderful!

The newly painted ceiling at the Queensborough Community Centre – another beautifully executed project by Queensborough craftsman Ed Couperus. (Photo courtesy of the Queensborough Community Centre Facebook page)

The food may have been bountiful and delicious aboard the Ascania, but somehow I doubt the shipboard breakfast buffet could compare with the new-crop maple syrup, freshly made pancakes, sizzling bacon and sausages, soft scrambled eggs and buttery warm toast that you’ll enjoy at the Queensborough Pancake Breakfast this Sunday morning. I’m getting really hungry just thinking about it.

Or maybe I’ll rephrase that by echoing Jack in his postcard to Elsie: “It makes my heart ache.” We are blessed with bounty!

Rural cathedrals: the beautiful old barns of Hastings County

“Local Barn in Black and White” is what Queensborough-area photographer Dave deLang – whose amazing work I’ve praised before, notably here and here and here – calls this gorgeous photo. The barn in question is near the corner of Declair and Rockies roads northeast of Queensborough. You can see more of Dave’s work, and contact him about it, through his posts on Flickr, which are here. (Photo courtesy of Dave deLang)

“Nobody builds barns anymore,” the chap at the rustic antiques place between Madoc and Belleville said to Raymond and me.

I can’t remember how we’d got onto the topic of barns – this conversation took place quite a few months ago – but I do recall how startled I was by his statement. The man went on to explain what he meant, and I realized I had noticed the phenomenon he was talking about without really noticing it, if you know what I mean. That phenomenon being: these days farmers who need new structures for storing crops or equipment, or the other things that barns are used for, are installing the semi-circular fabric structures – are they maybe called “coveralls”? – that now dot the rural landscape. Here’s an example:

And here’s another:

I’d seen these structures without realizing that they are the modern-day equivalent of – and actually, I guess, replacement for – the beautiful 19th-century wooden barns that one can still find throughout Hastings County, and especially in our North-of-7 area. The photo by our friend Dave deLang that’s at the top of this post (and that Dave very kindly gave me permission to use) is easily the most beautiful example I have to show you, but here are a few others in photos by yours truly:

The Tokley barn, Declair Road, Queensborough.

The Cassidy barn, Queensborough Road east of Queensborough.

The Shaw barn, Keller’s Bridge Road north of Eldorado.

Another Queensborough Road barn, east of Queensbororough.

With the exception of my sojourn of a little over 15 years in Montreal, barns have been a part of the landscape of my life since childhood. Now that Raymond and I have moved permanently from Montreal to Queensborough, barns are once again something I see every day, passing by them on my way to and from town, and work, and so on. You see them without seeing them, most of the time; but every now and then – like when the antiques guy made that stark announcement – you realize what an important part of our history and landscape they really are.

It takes a lot of work to build a big wooden barn. We’ve all heard of old-time barn-raisings, when all the neighbours in a rural area would get together to get the job done in one or two sweat-soaked days, the men and boys working in teams to get that huge building up and the women and girls working in teams to produce the giant joints of roasted meat and gallons of mashed potatoes and endless pies needed to fuel that hard manual labour. Whether that’s how the barns that I see every day were built, or whether it was more commonly done by just the family members and a smaller group of helpers over a longer building period, I don’t know – and I’d love to learn more about that, if any of my readers have some knowledge or even experience on that front.

The McKinnon barn (Queensborough Road west of Queensborough) under a glorious late-afternoon sky.

What I do know is that we should not take these huge and wonderful buildings, these monuments to the agricultural life and to the people who lived and worked it in the earlier days of this region, for granted. I am happy to say that many of the old barns in the Queensborough area are well-kept-up and still used. Some others have started to crumble, and they can be magnificent even as they fall into ruin.

Either way, they are a lot more interesting to look at than their modern-day equivalents.

Doesn’t every household need a Cyclone egg scale?

Here once again is our newly repaired Harvest Gold stove. But do you know what the object to its right, on the windowsill, is?

If you happened to read my post last night – about the inexpensive repair that gave the Manse’s 35-plus-year-old Harvest Gold stove several more years of life – you might have noticed a funny-looking object in my photo. It was near the stove, on the windowsill of the tiny pantry that currently serves as the Manse’s kitchen. Did you by any chance wonder what odd thing Katherine and Raymond had found now to put in the Manse?

Well, now I’ll tell you what it was. It was an egg scale. Did you guess?

Here’s the closeup photo of the object in question:

I’ve mentioned lots of times how much Raymond and I like to check out antiques barns, flea markets and yard sales in search of vintage treasures. We found this egg scale in one of those antiques barns, and we just couldn’t resist it. Because, you know, it’s not just any egg scale; this, people, is a Cyclone! Made by the Cyclone Mfg. Co. of Urbana, Indiana, maker of “Modernized Poultry Supplies”! In other words: this is the Nimbus 2000 of egg scales!

Here’s the mysterious thing, though: was our egg scale intended for industrial, commercial or household use?

I can see an egg-producing company needing something to confirm that all the eggs in a given carton are the size they’re supposed to be, but this little one-egg-at-a-time scale seems rather rinky-dink for that.

On the other hand, why would a housewife (I’m sorry, but it was surely all about housewives in the era when this scale was produced) need to check the size of an egg once she’d brought it home from the store? Presumably it would have been sold to her as being of such-and-such a size?

Which makes me wonder whether the gizmo would have been used by small merchants who might buy a whole bunch of unsorted eggs wholesale – perhaps even from local producers – and would need to check the size before selling them, which perhaps they sometimes did in ones and twos as opposed to the standard dozen we buy them in today.

But really I just don’t know. What I do know is that our vintage egg scale makes us smile and is a good conversation piece. Which means it totally belongs right here at the Manse.