A week on Sunday 7/52

Day in the life 

I’m currently reading Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Amazon) by Esyllt W. Jones as I conduct a bit of family research and have little to say on the subject right now. (Reading, reading, reading… I’m just a little squirrel gathering facts.) 

I was going to leave it at that, but as I was looking up a recipe for the following section, I was scrolling through my history and found that Thursday was particularly illustrative of a day spent in research… I spent the day going through the online archives of Henderson Directories. (It’s so convenient, even though I did appreciate feeling the heft of these books at the library when I went in November of 2024!)

Isn’t it glamorous? All this clicking through year after year of directories, to find names and to see where they’re living? 

Here, in 1933, we see two families, the Faucher and the Tytgat, living in St. Boniface: Arthur on Aubert Street and Alice with her father Camille on Dawson Road, a few years before they marry. 

I am unable to write a story out of thin air, but as I gather these elements one by one, a story starts to take shape in my mind…

Eating

It took exactly one TikTok video to convince me to make this Spicy Carrot Rigatoni. (Canadian content creators - yay!) (Also the library identified Hailee Catalano’s cookbook as Canadian?)

But back to the recipe… so clever! Carrots went sneakily undercover camouflaged as sauce and crossed into defended “no vegetables allowed” territory unnoticed. It was a strategic win for this kitchen chef.

From a main to a side… can we discuss polenta? Until this week, I’d been fine with using plain old, abundantly available cornmeal. Cornmeal is tiny, not powdery, of a texture similar to iodized salt. It reminds me of cream of wheat. Polenta made from cornmeal is similar in texture to cream of wheat. Once most of the water has been absorbed, bubbles form, puff and release as it cooks. I could not understand recipes that called for long cooking times… Enter Carla Lalli Music’s recipe “Baked Polenta with Floppy Broccoli” which, in the list of ingredients in the cookbook, specifies “polenta, not quick-cooking”. What is “not quick-cooking polenta”? Cornmeal didn’t seem right anymore! Indeed, if you like bearing down on details, using cornmeal that is smooth and small for polenta is fine, but cornmeal that has more of the character and shape of ground corn (or maize) kernels, that is a bit more roughly ground, is more flavourful. And thank goodness for stores that carry brands like Bob’s Red Mill for just such a product. One night we baked it in the oven, as in Lalli Music’s recipe, another night we cooked it in the slow cooker as per package instructions. The latter was better: longer to cook, but more evenly cooked and easier to clean. All this for Jenny Rosenstrach’s Cider Braised Meatballs.  

Baking

Do you have a favourite chocolate-chip cookie recipe? Until this week, our family didn’t. I therefore planned a cookie test. I had four recipes, but had to cut one because, having been written entirely by weight, I was left with too big a puzzle when the kitchen scale I’d been using for the past 20 years disappeared its digital numerals forever. Oh well! I made do with cups and tablespoons, and the family voted and agreed that by a very slim margin, Sarah Fennel’s “Best Chocolate Chip Cookies in the World” was the winner. Hooray! We now have a dedicated chocolate chip cookie recipe!

Enjoying

1. Podcast interviews with local historian Murray Peterson and city archivist Sarah Ramsden on Our City, Our Podcast. Conducted in 2024, I stumbled upon the former’s name when finding that my mother-in-law’s grandfather’s first residence in Manitoba is today a Heritage Building. From seeing a person’s name online, to having their voice in your ears and hearing their thrill for a subject you too are thrilled about is the gift a podcast can offer. 

2. This three-part story of a meet cute by Amber Estenson, known as That Midwestern Mom on TikTok, pleased my little romantic heart. Not to mention that she fell in love with a teacher!

Postcards

Another week featuring fog and frost! One morning the conditions were just right for even Enzo to have frosty hairs! So cute!!

The frost was different from day to day…

Happy Sunday!

Friday Five

Welcome to my little spot on the web, where, like a bird on a blade of bluestem I cheerily chirp in comfortable invisibility. Ha! This week brings more thoughts on writing, the foundational joy of these weekly dispatches, and… some fall colour! Cheers!

1 Writing

I like listening to writers talk about writing because I crave all their voices and experience in the silence of muddling along. For example, I nod along with Alexandra Shulman when she says “I’m somebody who never knows what I’m going to write ever until I start writing it. […] I write it down and then once I’ve written down wherever I get, then I go back and try and turn it into something that’s a bit more ordered.” It makes me think of Joan Didion’s expression: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” But do you see how Shulman’s statement is a little more raw, a little less literary? In the yellow glow of my black desk lamp, I more often feel like Shulman, a little humbled by my inability to draw up a plan and follow it. It’s in the glare of sunlight through a café window, joking with a friend over lunch that I can venture to be Joan Didion-like, just “writing to think…”

Or, for another example, I like how Jon Ronson said he needs “months to write”, that being a columnist wasn’t something he liked because his brain just didn’t work that way… “I’m very slow.” And while this might seem like an unflattering quote, such confessions are deeply reassuring for people whose creativity has a matching way of working itself out.

Slow percolation and spontaneity … I wonder if it’s related in a way to Carson Ellis’s own observation on the subject of narrative storytelling, when she tells Debbie Millman that she wishes she “felt more comfortable with it and better at it” but that she freezes when “faced with the challenge of making up a story, even if it could be about anything. Like you’re telling a story to a three-year-old with no expectations, the bar is very low, and I still feel kind of frozen by it.” I too get the same feeling.

Perhaps the fun of listening to this kind of “shop talk” is the excitement of a kind of pattern recognition, whereby I find in the professionals things I’ve begun to notice in myself and it’s a boost to my confidence. 

2 Breath

The ideas in this book have recently taken over our thoughts and modified some of our habits… I originally heard about the book on the podcast “People I Mostly Admire”. James Nestor’s writing voice is nice to read and he has a kind tone. Steve Levitt remarked on this in his podcast, saying “you came to book writing somewhat late” and then noting the success of his books. Nestor answers that for him, writing has been an outlet, “what I would do to feed my soul at nighttime and on weekends.” I find it inspiring that this kind of attitude toward writing imbues a reader’s experience of the book itself.

3 Eating

I made doughnuts from scratch for the friends and family festivities at our house Halloween night. It was a little chaotic… Christian had to serve supper on limited counter space while answering the door and being cheerful while the dog howled so I could concentrate entirely on managing dough and hot oil. But! They were a SUCCESS! I followed Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe in Start Here to the letter, and the outcome was plush and crisp and perfectly sweet. I learned about proofing dough - comparing the right amount of proofing to a handprint on memory foam was effective - and used coconut oil for frying as she recommended. Having our whole house smell like it was doused in coconut-scented sunscreen seems like an extra perk of the recipe. Wow.

Photo credit.

4 Research

I’m doing this little side-project for fun and it involves these directories that get bigger and bigger along with Winnipeg’s population growth. They’re called Henderson Directories and they list an individual’s name, their occupation, place of employment and address. They also list house owners by street. These tactile sources of data amaze me. They’re also a poor subject of conversation, of the “did you know” type. 

Research makes me think of Tyler Virgen’s post “The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge”. I really like this blog post. It begins small, leads to a little goose-chase and lots of sleuthing, contains self-doubt, has moments of humorous refocusing, plunges into dusty archives, contains newspaper clippings and delivers a satisfying ending. If I were a professor, I’d dedicate a class to this blog post, just for the illustration of research it provides.

5 The view

It’s so colourful this time of year…

I feel like milkweed makes a flamboyant show in the fall compared to the demure dusty-rose of its summertime flower clusters.

In case you were doubting the above statement…

The river recedes from the shore, going so low as to reveal new islands and the perfect profile of a duck.

Today, a row of willow looked like this, still leafy:

Happy Friday!

Dedication

This book dedication, from Claire M. Strom’s book Profiting from the Plains, encapsulates research and motherhood:

This book is dedicated to my daughter,
Phoebe Helga Margaret Strom
She was not yet born when I started my research and will be eleven by the time it is published. She has, therefore, through no fault or choice of her own, lived with James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway all her life. I thank her for that, and for the joy and grace she has brought to my life.

James J. Hill was a decent man, and he kept a diary. His biographer Martin Albro writes:

Like many another diarist, James J. Hill began the new year with the best of intentions, but quickly found that it was an onerous task to live a full, energetic, exciting life and note it all down in a book as well.

Here’s to exciting days!

Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.