Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Also available in print.

Merry Christmas! As we move closer and closer to the sestercentennial in 2026, here’s a centennial-adjacent cookbook from 1876. While Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876 (PDF File, 5.1 MB) was, obviously, designed specifically for 1876, it had nothing to do with the Centennial. It was, ostensibly at least, an almanac. So there was one for every year, including 1876.

“Mrs. Winslow” was not selling a baking product. “Mrs. Winslow’s” had been putting out Receipt Books every year since at least 1863, in the service of selling Brown’s Bronchial Troches¹ and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. They’re often classified as quack medicines but I’m not sure that they’re “quack” in the normal sense of the word. Judging from the ingredients and the advertisements in this pamphlet, they did what they were advertised to do.

Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup may not have been the best idea for quieting children suffering “the excruciating pain of Cutting Teeth”, but it probably did reduce the pain: it contained morphine. Most of the adult medicines promise to relieve coughs and sore throats, which they probably did. The products advertised in these almanacs, at least, do not appear to have promised a cure of the underlying ailment, only a refuge from the symptoms. Given the state of medicine at the time, they may even not have been the worst of contemporary methods of relieving such ailments.

The somewhat sporadic ritual where rich white liberals wash the feet of minorities has to be the weirdest bit of racism to come out of the compulsory racist teachings of the institutional left. In the first draft I had the adjective “unintentional” in front of “racism”, but any people who publish “white culture” posters that claim it’s white culture to plan for the future, use logic, and understand cause and effect probably understand very well what they’re doing.

It’s interesting to compare this bit of specious invocation of religion with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a dream speech. I have a dream only made sense to people who understood the Biblical references King was making, whether it be people who were themselves religious or people who had seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments as little as three years earlier.¹

King’s speech, in other words, required knowledge of its listeners. This modern washing of the feet, in contrast, requires ignorance, at least if it’s going to be taken at face value. If you’re familiar with the event it’s drawing on, it doesn’t make any sense.

The foot-washing in the Bible that this modern foot ritual resembles was the Son of God washing the feet of imperfect man to cleanse them of their sins. The explanation that racists have made up for the ritual that if “even Jesus” can wash the feet of the apostles, surely we can wash the feet of those we’ve oppressed falls completely apart to anyone who actually goes back to the Biblical narrative it’s invoking.

But… it’s not “even Jesus”. It’s only Jesus. Unless the foot-washing goes both ways, this was not something that man can emulate, not without a lot of hubris, especially in the form it takes: it’s always the white liberal in these rituals taking the place of Jesus, and the minority is always the person getting their foot washed.

Jesus was literally washing their feet because he was better than them. Peter said, no way you’re going to wash my feet, I should wash your feet. Jesus replied, in effect, you’re dirty and I’m not. You are not worthy to enter my home unless I wash your feet.

My local Catholic church uses occasional Latin phrases during the Masses leading up to Christmas and Easter. Our pastor reasoned that (a) Latin is the official language of the Church, (b) it makes a distinction between the different seasons, and (c) it “draws us deeper into the mystery of the liturgy”.

This inspired me, on seeing an old Latin grade school textbook at a library book sale, to attempt to learn basic Latin. The book I’m using is Jenney, Thompson, and Smith’s First Year Latin from 1953. This is a very dense book; I’m currently about 19% of the way through it after several years. Had I been one of the students it was meant for back in the fifties, this would have been a lot of work to complete in one year!

I’m not going to talk about pronunciation. Textbook Latin and Catholic Latin are pronounced differently, and Catholic Latin tends to be pronounced at least slightly differently in different churches. My experience solely in American churches is that Catholic Latin basically follows the rules of Italian pronunciation. If you know those rules, follow them but pay attention to how your church might be doing things a little differently. If you don’t know those rules, just pay attention and you’ll get it. The most obvious difference between Italian and American pronunciations is that the “ch” sound is a hard “k” in Italian; the soft “c” of American English (receive, decipher) is pronounced as the American English “ch” (church, for instance…) and with basically the same rule: when the “c” is followed by an “i” or an “e”.

With all that out of the way, one of the simplest prayers sung or spoken in Latin during Mass is the Agnus Dei. Many Catholic prayers are titled by their first words in the original Latin. So the prayer that begins, in English, as “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary” is called “Memorare” because Memorare is the first word in the original Latin—it means “remember”. And the prayer that begins “Lamb of God” is called the “Agnus Dei” because those are its first words in the original:

• • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
  • Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

Also available as a printed copy.

My Independence Day post this year presented a collection of recipes celebrating the 1876 Centennial. I couldn’t find as many such books as I could find for 1976. I’ve continued to find Bicentennial cookbooks well after my inaugural 2023 post. Most likely, improved and more economical printing technology over the century between 1876 and 1976 opened the opportunity for more organizations to publish.

As a result of the dearth of source material, though, I had a few automatic searches set up on various sites to find Centennial books. Not all of the results were about the Centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A lot were about state centennials. Some were apparently just because “centennial” is a cool name.

The New Centennial Cook Book (PDF File, 4.7 MB) appears to be one of the latter. It came up in my searches because the seller thought that the “centennial” in the title meant that was the year of publication. And yet, there’s nothing else in the book to bolster that assumption.

It really looked like the word “centennial” in “New Centennial Cook Book” was referring to something else. A search on newspapers.com seemed to confirm my suspicions. The same company that produced this pamphlet also produced a line of (apparently cheap) kitchenware. L. E. Brown & Co.’s “patent Centennial Cake Pan” first appeared in August 1877, in an advertisement aimed as much at sales agents as at bakers:

One of the reasons for starvation in the world today is that no one cares. But not in the way most people think about it when they say that no one cares.

The easy assumption, made by everyone from American politicians to so many Catholic charities, is that starvation in the world is a failure of sharing, and we need to convince more people to share. And certainly, sharing is a Good.

But even ignoring fake charities and charities that have devolved into Brazil-like bureaucracies more concerned with their own survival than their ostensible beneficiaries, there is demonstrably enough sharing in the world, especially originating from the United States, to end starvation across the globe. The reason we continue to see starvation is a failure of acceptance.

If the failure of acceptance could be solved—if we could convince foreign governments to accept gifts rather than deny them or, worse, filter them through layers of value-destroying corruption—there would be more than enough sharing already today.

This is true even in, perhaps especially in, the United States, where we can see the stultifying bureaucracy that eats up most of every tax dollar taken from us in the name of sharing with our fellow Americans.

Further, sharing itself would increase if there were greater acceptance of it, if it was obvious that our sharing went to the poor who need it rather than bureaucracies that do not. It’s one thing to share and see a lessening of hunger and to see the poor lift themselves out of poverty because of our aid. It’s entirely another thing to share and see food wasted and rotting, to see money lost in corruption and a Brazil^•-level bureaucracy, to see only people with the time to be professional recipients have the time to navigate the welfare system in the United States or the charity system abroad.

At some point, knowingly giving more money to dictators and corrupt bureaucrats changes from charity to a wasteful and deadly form of virtue signaling. Charity has to mean giving effectively or it isn’t charity at all but mere vanity.

How long could you hold your hand in this oven?

TDLR: If all you came here for was to quickly choose a temperature equivalent to “quiet oven”, try 325° to 350°.

One of the problems we run into when trying to use cookbooks from the 1800s and earlier is how completely different their environment was from ours. They make assumptions about what the reader is familiar with that are often for all practical purposes a complete inversion over our own experience.

In A Centennial Meal I provided an 1876 cornbread recipe, but I modified the recipe to be baked. The original recipe…

…involves steaming the cornbread rather than baking it, which is likely to be an entirely different texture! It would also be more work and not something I’d want to do in July in Texas. It highlights a big difference between today and 1876: it was probably easier in some cases to boil bread then than it was to start up the oven, get it to the right point in the oven’s cooling process, and bake.

Stoves in the past required fire. It required starting a fire and then managing a fire. You can see something similar in the instructions for making tapioca custard in Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876. Instead of cooking the tapioca for several minutes, her French Tapioca Custard soaks it in cold water for five hours. The latter takes a lot more time and planning, but it also doesn’t require starting a fire and getting it just right.

Similarly, you almost never see the phrase “room temperature” in older recipes. Everything’s already at room temperature, or close to it. The difficulty with butter or milk isn’t softening it or souring it. The difficulty is keeping it firm or “sweet”. Older recipes call for sweet milk because sweet milk is difficult. By default, butter is soft. By default, milk goes sour.

As part of integrating my annual Kolchak adventures with the movies and series, I’ve tried to put together a timeline of when relevant episodes actually took place. This allows me to, for example, give whoever is playing Dr. Leslie Dwyer the background that the events of “Mr. R.I.N.G.” took place four years ago, in 1972.

The timeline for the Kolchak movies is reasonable enough, if slightly confused—they happen a year or two apart. Add in the television series and things start to get very crowded very quickly, and occasionally even directly contradictory. If you go by the evidence in the television series, some of the Chicago episodes happened before the Seattle events in The Night Strangler! And while Kolchak had worked in Chicago before Las Vegas (at about 28 minutes in he and Gail Foster start listing the number of times he was fired in every major city in the United States) it wouldn’t likely have been for INS and it definitely would not have been for Vincenzo.

Because I’ve been running a game with Kolchak and his guest stars for four years now at the North Texas RPG Convention, I’ve had to make some assumptions about what experience they already have with the horrors Kolchak attracts, and when they had them. This has highlighted for me that Kolchak’s adventures are far too dense using the assumed timeline, that the movies happened in 1971 and either 1972 or 1973, and the series episodes in 1974 or 1975.

While none of the episodes mention a year, if you remember Kolchak’s iconic voiceovers from the movies, you probably remember that they took the form of “Weekday, Month Date”. That makes them relatively easy to place in a year. But much of it doesn’t make sense. When I looked at it closely, it turns out that there are timeline contradictions already in the second movie!

I wrote in The Wrong Goodbye,

I should have added a link to the Mimsy Were the Borogoves group on MeWe ages ago; not sure why I didn’t. I’ve been updating it for a while now. I’ve found MeWe to be much easier to use than FaceBook, and much easier to interact with people without losing them in a mass of oddly-sorted posts and ads.