Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down.
Just recently I received an early inheritance (the best kind, because no one dies). It is a book that once belonged to my grandmother. Written by Peg Bracken, and published in 1963, it is entitled The I Hate To Housekeep Book – subtitled When and how to keep house without losing your mind.
It’s for women who don’t want to live in a pit of filth, nor be 24/7 spotless housekeepers, nor go about nursing grudges against all the housework they find themselves doing.
“Consider, for a moment, your spotless housekeeper. She housekeeps most of the time, apportioning various chores to different days: Tuesday morning is ironing morning. She calls this Not letting the House Get On Top Of Her.
“But the occasional housekeeper doesn’t know she’ll be ironing that day, nor does she care to. It would depress her to know that this was the shape and colour of next Tuesday morning. She would rather just let it happen, should an ill-natured Providence so decree.”
Strolling through the file system this morning, I discovered a photo I’ve never shared with you: the cake I made for the Restoration Day release party.
It was the first time I made an icing other than the plainest of plain (water + icing sugar and a tiny bit of butter). Memory is hazy at this distance, but it might have been buttercream icing. With, as you can see in the photo, the viscera of at least one lemon.
It was delicious. Less delicious was the other photo I happened across: a dead mouse floating in the cats’ water bowl. (Always feed your cat on time.)