"Roundheads and Ramblings"

Book Club Guides

The Gideonite Missionaries Throw a Party for Book Lovers

Posted on Thursday, July 10, 2014 7:24 PM

I just added a new board to my Pinterest page -- Gideonite Missionaries' Book Club. It's a guide for any book club that might want to read "Left by the Side of the Road" for their monthly selection. The board starts out with two longish articles that explain how I ended up publishing a book of short stories. Next come a couple of book lists for further reading. Discussion questions follow.

And then we're ready to talk about food. There are no alcoholic beverages on offer this time. These people were missionaries, after all. But even though they abstained from alcohol, they certainly enjoyed eating. And true to their callings, many of the dishes on offer have a religious connection. The drink of the evening is "Land of Milk and Honey Smoothies." Unleavened bread brings in the Biblical influence, with an assortment of Mediterranean dips and spreads, including "Mount of Olives Tapenade" and "Greek Apostles" cucumber dip.

The entree is "Loaves and Fishes Po'Boys." And we finish with a choice of desserts. First comes "Huguenot Torte" whose origins are murkily connected to the Protestant Reformation but whose crunchy goodness is still very popular in Charleston restaurants. And we end with "Scripture Cake," whose recipe sends you off to the Bible again to find out what the ingredients really are. Austa French would approve!

Book Club Guide for "Beyond All Price"

Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2014 1:50 PM

I've opened a new Pinterest board designed to furnish suggestions to any book club that decides to read "Beyond All Price." It contains a couple of longish articles about why I chose to write about the Roundhead Regiment, and then why I decided to focus on Nellie Chase, the regimental nurse. Two book lists provide additional reading; one on the other books in this series, and the other on the general topic of nurses in the Civil War. After that come several pins of discussion topics--questions about plot, setting, character, and theme.

I always enjoy putting together some book-related menu items, but in this case, I ended up with two different ideas. So why not let you choose. One of the central scenes in the book is the Christmas party the Roundheads hosted in Beaufort in 1861. If your club has a December meeting, this might be ideal. The text suggests that they served only cakes, cookies, and punches. There's a wonderfully dense fruitcake featuring only dried fruits, not that horrid technicolored mishmash of candied stuff sold in modern supermarkets. The other two cakes are traditional Southern specialties -- coconut and caramel cakes. To accompany them, there is syllabub, which probably sounds more interesting in the text than it is in practice. Another possibility, and one the Roundheads would have applauded, is Artillery Punch, a particularly lethal blend of all varieties of alcoholic beverages. (Artillery Punch is still to be found in military circles. We first encountered it at a Navy base on New Year's Eve. Luckily we lived just across the street from the party site, so we made it home!) Nellie also recommended a non-alcoholic punch, so there's one of those, too. Throw in some spicy pecans and some benne wafer cookies, and you have a sure-fire formula for a rowdy, if not scholarly, book discussion.

At other times of the year, a brunch might be more suitable. The scene in which the Leverett slaves introduce the Roundheads to the traditional southern breakfast provides many ideas. You probably don't want to put acorns in your coffee, but chickory is an acceptable subsitute. Then offer ham biscuits, grits, and sausage gravy (or maybe red-eye gravy). If it's a late morning affair, add a bowl of Nellie's own oyster stew.

Nellie knew that good food helped her patients get well faster. You won't go far wrong following any of her suggestions.

Lunch and a Book Discussion at Frogmore

Posted on Thursday, June 05, 2014 2:39 PM

The Road to Frogmore provides much fodder for a book club discussion, and my new Pinterest board offers some ideas to be considered along the way. It starts with a bit of author biography, in which I talk about some of the ways I have always felt myself to be something of a misfit. (That’s an observation that most writers could make, I suspect.)

Then we move to a longer passage about Laura M. Towne and the reasons I became interested in her rather than some of the other missionaries whom she accompanied to the Low Country. Laura was also a misfit, and the ways in which she differed from her companions explain much about her later life.

Next, I have offered some questions to stimulate discussion. They center on the usual breakdowns of setting, plot, theme, and character, but they are only starting points for those who seek to understand the book. I’ve also included two reading lists — one listing the other books in this series, and (more importantly) several other books that cover the same events as this book. Dr. Rose’s massive study,

Rehearsal for Reconstruction, provides an overview of the Gideonite experiment; the others are first-hand accounts written by Laura and others among her friends.

And then we come to the good part — suggestions for what to eat and drink at such a meeting. As I have done with my other Book Club Guides, I have tried to keep the choices true to the book itself. Laura and her housemates were on limited rations. The Army provided them with small allowances of commodities such as flour and sugar, but for the most part, they relied on the same sources of food as did the slaves. They had their own gardens for vegetables, and a few chickens to provide eggs (or meat, if the chicken quit laying eggs.). Most of their protein came from seafood or the white fish that could be pulled from the freshwater streams in the area. They had no access to alcohol, so this luncheon will be one fit for teetotalers.

Laura’s diary describes some of their meals in detail. At almost every meal they ate turtle soup, so that might be a natural choice, if it were not for the fact that now, most turtles in the Carolinas are endangered species, and trying to find recipes for turtle soup is likely to yield an internet lecture on why the turtles may not be eaten. I’ve included a recipe, but I really don’t expect anyone to serve it.

The slaves the missionaries had come to help continued to work for them as cooks and fishermen, so Laura’s table served Gullah recipes, which fall into two categories. One set starts with seasonings of tomatoes, onions, and peppers, along with a bit of fatback or bacon, adds some sort of seafood, and then serves the resulting dish over grits. The recipe here is for the iconic shrimp and grits of South Carolina.

The other variation starts with the same seasonings to create a type of gumbo, although this is not the gumbo we’ve come to know from New Orleans. The Gullah variety uses okra as the thickener instead of a rich dark roux and is served over rice, which continued to be grown on the plantations of the Low Country. Either dish, accompanied by some fried green tomatoes, would provide a satisfactory and authentic Gullah lunch.

Another possibility is to rely on that perennial favorite, Frogmore Stew, a tradition that also began with the slaves of St. Helena. What does one do when no one has enough to provide supper? You get together with the neighbors, and each cook throws into the pot whatever she has -- a chicken, some sausage, a few potatoes, an onion, some cobs of corn, some shrimp, or crabs, or oysters, or fish. It all boils together, and then is poured out onto a table, where the diners gather around and help themselves.

If the group does not want to eat a sit-down meal, they might snack on boiled peanuts and soft ginger cookies. Peanuts were a staple of slave diets. The cookies remind the reader of the ginger cakes that Lottie Forten baked for her friend, Dr. Seth Rogers, surgeon of the famous 54th Massachusetts.

If this menu were completely legitimate, the only beverage would be molasses water, which the slaves loved and the missionaries drank grudgingly. If you want to get an idea of what it tasted like, think of a glass of coke poured over ice and allowed to sit for several hours, until the ice all melted and the soda went completely flat. A pitcher of lemonade might better bring this meal to a close.

When a Book Club Reads "Damned Yankee. . . "

Posted on Sunday, June 01, 2014 3:47 PM

I've just finished posting a board on Pinterest to provide materials for any book club that wants to read "Damned Yankee" as their monthly selection. You can find it on my Pinterest site , right next to the board for the book itself, which offers maps and photos of the setting. Here are some of the items available to make your meeting a success:

To start, there's an author biography in which I discuss my own tendency to change professions every few years. It seemed an appropriate topic for a book about another teacher who had to find a new career.
Next comes a link to an article in which I discuss the origins of this particular story.
Several sections of questions cover discussion suggestions centered on the plot, setting, characters, and theme of the book.
You'll find a few quotes from reviewers, which are, of course, open for discussion amongst the readers. Feel free to disagree.
There's a reading list of other novels that are similar to this one, and . . .
A listing of the other four books in my series, "The Civil War in South Carolina's Low Country."

And now for the good stuff: a group of recipes based on the book -- all of which would make a lovely spread to offer to a Book Club hungry for lunch as well as ideas.

Start with a crunchy chicken salad -- one that uses a relatively small amount of left-over chicken and expands it by adding Georgia sweet onions and celery straight out of Susan's kitchen garden, apples and walnuts from Jonathan's orchard, and some muscadines from the farm's grapevines.
Add some tang by offering a dish of 14-day pickles--the ones the Grenville daughters learned to make in the farm's kitchen.
Balance both with a small drop biscuit featuring cheese shreds from one of Eddie's dairy experiments.
Offer both non-alcoholic and adult drinks. For those who abstain, Susan has a recipe for making Charleston's own sweet tea.
For those who prefer something stronger, use Jonathan's homemade brandy to flavor a couple of peach-themed drinks -- a Georgia mint julip or a peach cocktail. (Note: I really don't recommend following Jonathan's recipe for homemade brandy, but if you do, be sure to let it age for the full six months. Then you can be sure that the cyanide from the peach pits has had time to be neutralized by the fermentation process.
And top off the meal with -- what else! -- a peach cobbler fresh from that Aiken peach orchard.

HAVE A WONDERFUL AFTERNOON!

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The Gideonite Missionaries Throw a Party for Book Lovers

Book Club Guide for "Beyond All Price"

Lunch and a Book Discussion at Frogmore

When a Book Club Reads "Damned Yankee. . . "