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The Seaforth News, 1953-08-20, Page 2ill 'Possom Trot' Got its Name "Where did you get that name --Possum Trot?" How often the question is asked is something we've never tried to keep track of, but it's plenty often. And after an experience we had this week I'm going to be able 10 answer it with a flourish. The name itself is a good and time- honored place -name of the mountain people who started from the eastern seaboard, along about the time they'd won the war that made America a na- tion, and trickled westward through Cumberland Gap, In the years that followed they settled the mountains of Ken- tucky and Tennessee and the :hills of north Georgia and sou- thern Indiana. Then they came to "tit' purtiest hills of all" and drove their roots deep down in- to the rocky crevices of the Ozarks. Wherever these folks stopped and wherever they pas- sed, you'll find the names they tarried with them, All you need do is take out over Thorny .Low Gap and drop down into PoOt Holler: then cross Chilly Branch and head up Turkey Run and that'll bring you right to possom Trot. If the path runs into a squirrel track which heads up a big den -tree and peters out On a knothole, use the technique Bob Burns made famous and "swing in on a grapevine!" Just take my word for it and follow those directions and you'll come safely to Possom Trot. Four autumns ago, when we had bought our bit of land but hadn't cleared the woods away enough to see up housekeeping, we used to drive out evenings in every kind of weather. I guess we wanted to see whether the view stood up as well under a driving rain or a gray and threatening sky as it did when the sun dropped into the river through a bank of blazing clouds. It did and it still does! On a certain clear, crisp even- ing in early December, we saw our hills and bit of valley under their first light fall of snow and it was beautiful. We left the var at the hilltop and walked ukd Porch Suppers . BY DORMS/ IIIADDOX NOW is the season for informal but substantial' porch or back Yard suppers, They can be pleasant 'affairs and need not take too much preparation lime, Base them on crispy fried chicken for best results. Remember, if you are serving the chicken cold and want to Cook it the day before or early in the clay, be certain to refrigerate it well, For safety's sake, that Is vitally important. Mao, when taking chicken to the beach or to'a picnic spot, refrigerate it thoroughly first. Arrange to keep it cold and eat it within 4 hours, Butter -Crisp Chicken One 2-3 pound frying chicken, salt, pepper, 1 cup flour, 1 tea- spoon paprika, i/a pound butter, shortening, thyme, if desired, thin onion rings, if desired. Have chicken drawn and cut Into serving pieces. Rinse in cold water and drain. Put salt, pepper, flour and paprika in paper bag, Shake 3 to 4 pieces of chicken in the bag at a time to coat thor- oughly. Heat enough butter and shortening in a heavy skillet to make a layer of fat nh inch deep. With kitchen tongs place chicken In hot fat, Brown on both sides. Place chicken, one layer deep, in shallow baking pan, For added flavor sprinkle with thyme and onion. Pour melted butter over chicken pieces. Bake In moderato oven (350 degrees F.) until tender, about 25 to 30 minutes, Haste with melted butter after 15 minutes of baking. * * * Here's another suggestion for a porch supper menu: Biscuit Beef Roll (4 generous servings). Two tablespoons fat, i/a cup finely diced onion, 1 small clove garlic, minced; vita pound chopped beef, 1 teaspoon kitchen bouquet, 0 -ounce can tomato paste, rk cup finely diced green pepper, 1 tea- spoon salt, 2 teaspoons sugar, '/e teaspoon pepper, i/i teaspoon chili powder, 1/2 teaspoon powdered oregano, 1 cup biscuit mix, about t14 cup milk. Melt fat in frying pan oyer low heat. Add onion and garlic and cook about 1 minute. Add chopped beef pulled into small bits and u d Fried Chicken Fried chicken, fresh vegetables and good bread make & siibstanarad porch supper, sprinkle in kitchen bouquet. Cook, stirring frequently, until meat is slightly browned. Add tomato paste, green pepper, salt, sugar, pepper, chili powder and oregano, Mix well and let cook over low heat about 10 minutes. Then remove from heat and cool slightly. Meanwhile combine biscuit mix and milk to make small ball of dough. Roll out on lightly floured board to make a rectangle about 8 x 12 inches. Spread meat and tomato mixture on dough almost to edges. Roll up like jelly roll. Place on greased shallow baking pan. Bake In moderately hot oven (375 degrees F.) uhtil roll is lightly browned and done, about 25 minutes. Remove to serving platter. Cut in 1 -inch slices to serve and accompany with whipped potatoes and a freshly cooked vegetable, down to the ancient persrrnmon tree which was to overhang our house, although we didn't know it then. Suddenly, in the gather- . ing dusk, Mama pointed to an indistinct small form, scurrying through the snow for the safety of the woods. "Rabbit," she said, excitedly, since even then we felt a pro- priety interest in our wildlife. "Rabbit nothing," I said, with the superior air of an average husband or a woodsman sure of his quarry, "That's a POS- SOM—and Mama, if you haven't set your heart on some such soupy name as Drip -honey Acres, let's call the place Possom —From "Possom Trot Farm," by Leonard Hall. / A 1,r, T 2Jane Andpews. Quinces seem to have fallen in popularity of recent years— 'which seerns a pity to those of us lucky enough to recall the Quince Honey and other good- ies of a bygone day. So here are some recipes making delightful use of the low- ly quince—also one for a blue- berry cake which I'm sure you'll find will call for encores a- plenty. QUINCE HONEY a quinces Sugar Pare the quinces and drop them in cold water. Cover the skins with boiling water and boil rapidly for 30 minutes. Drain. Grate the quinces and add to liquor drained from skins. Cook mixture for 20 minutes. Skim and add an equal amount of su- gar. Simmer for 10 minutes, then pour into hot sterilized jars and seal. Makes about three pints. * * * BAKED QUINCES 1 quart peeled, quartered quinces 1 cup liquor in which quinces are cooked /4 cup sugar Cover quince quarters with water and cook until tender. Drain, place in a baking dish, add sugar and liquid, and bake until the syrup is thick and the fruit a rich red. Serve cold, with plain og whipped cream, Four servings. Ks QUINCE GINGER 6 pounds ripe quinces 2 cups water 4 pounds sugar 4 lemons, cut in paper -titin slides 1 ounce ginger root, green or dried Pare and core the quinces and cut in thin slices or in small pieces. Boil water and sugar to- gether for five minutes, thhen add quinces, ginger root, and lemons. Simmer for about two hours or until the fruit is transparent and a deep ruby red. Seal at once in hot sterilized jars. Makes five to six pints. * * M QUINCE PRESERVES 5 pounds quinces 4 pounds sugar I lemon, quartered 3 cups water Peel, core, and quarter the quinces, removing any hard or bruised spots Cover the peelings with water, add the lemon, and boil slowly for about 30 minutes, covered. Remove from heat and strain. Combine suger and water and boil slowly until sugar is dissolved, Add the water in which the peelings were boiled to the syrup, also the quartered quince s. Boil slowly until quinces are tender. Place the fruit in hot sterilized jars, add syrup and seal. Makes five to six pints. BLUEBERRY CAKE 1 cup sugar Bookie With a Book—A bookie reads his book, but it's a work on philosophy. Colin Leslie Fox, 32 -year-old licensed bookmaker from England, reads by kerosene light, abroard his 23 -foot yawl which took him on 0 7000 -mile Atlantic voyage. Anchored in Ns'w York's East River, he now plans on selling his sailboat and buying a car 10 lour Americo. "STOPPED TOO EARLY" "It is now more than ten years since some very definite con- clusions were reached by the Committee on Artificial Respiration of the Health League of Canada as to the possibilities and limita- tions of artificial respiration, especially in cases of drowning;" writes Dr. Gordon Bates, general director of the Health League. "It is surprising that the lessons learned at that time seem too frequently to have been forgotten and that, time after time, one reads newspaper reports of artificial respiration having been stopped too early." Dr. Bates summarizes some of the chief points which should be generally known as follows: (1) There is hope of reviving persons apparently drowned even though the duration of immersion has been up to half on hour. Persons hove been revived after up to this period under water. (2) The fact that most of the usual signs of life are often entirely absent in an apparently drowned person is not a final indication of death. Persons have been revived by artificial respiration after hours of apparent death from various causes. Until some indication of life appar- ent to everyone appeared, there was no pulse, no heart sound audible by stethoscope examination, no reflex of any kind. (3) Artificial respiration should be commenced immediately in all cases under water for less than half an hour and should be continued without an instant intermission until all hope is lost. (4) The rule laid down by the Health League of Canada's committee was that it should be continued for a minimum of four hours or until rigor mortis has set in; and there should be no exception to this rule. (5) Additional rules have to do with keeping the patient warm by all means possible and seeing to it that the air passages are clear. "This last suggestion is very important," the Health League director emphasizes. "In many cases it has been found that a laryngeal spasm exists. This condition, while it effectively prevents water from getting into the lungs, also prevents the entry of air, At the moment, no more effective means of opening the larynx is known other than seeing that the tongue is pulled out during artificial respiration." butter size of an egg 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder little salt 1 teaspoon vanilla• About three-quarters cup of blueberries. First take a little of the flour measured for the cake and mix it with the blueberries, Cream sugar, butter, and egg together. Add milk. Add flour, baking powder, and salt, sifted together, then the vanilla. Last, add the floured berries. Mix well, and bake in moderate oven. Cut in squares, and eat hot with plenty of butter. k * 4. OLD-FASHIONED CATSUP 1 gallon 04 peck) ripe tomatoes 4 pods hot red peppers 2 tablespoons salt 1E, tablespoon ground allspice 3 tablespoons grained black pepper 3 tablespoons grained black pepper 1 pint vinegar Cook tomatoes and pods of hot red peppers• together until ten- der, Put through a coarse sieve. Stir in all remaining ingredients. Simmer from 3-4 hours, watching carefully that it does not stick. Bottle and cork while hot. This catsup improves with age, al- though it turns dark brown. Casey Jones Was Teal Casey Jones was a good engineer, T01' his firemen to have no fear, "Al1I want's a WI' water an' ooa1, .Peep Mit de cab and see de drivers rol', . , Who knows when and if Paul Bunyan ever lived? (All we know is he dredged Puget Sound.) Mike Fink may have been a keelbtat.man on the O -hi -o a hundred years ago, but we can never know. Big John Henry was either the Black River Giant—a roustabout —who lived only in legend or a real champion "steel driver" on the C&O whose "ten -pound maul" helped put through the Big Bend Tunnel in the early 1870's. But "Cayce" (Casey) Jones was a real engineer. He did drive the Illinois Central's Cannon Ball Express from Memphis, Tennes- see, to Canton, Mississippi, ("A car roller, and in my estimation the prince of them all," said one of his conductors.) He did mount "to the cabin with his orders in his hand," and then, when "Old number four stared us right in the face," shout to his fireman, "Boy, you'd better jump," before taking "his farewell trip to the promised land" with one hand on the throttle and the other on the whistle cord, They've put, up a granite monu- ment to the engineer from Cayce, Kentucky, at Vaughan, Missis- sippi, the hamlet where his "six - eight wheeler" plowed into the rear box cars of a freight that hadn't cleared the siding, That was near midnight of April 29, 1900. His Negro fireman, Sim Webb, who jumped at his order, was on hand at the dedication last month. So was his widow, bright-eyed Mrs, John Luther Jones. And they rang the bell from old No. 638 (which has long been calling good people to worship at the Black Jack Me- thodist Church), And they blew the whistle Casey could "moan like a lonesome turtle dove." hurry up, engine, and hurry up, train, Missie gwinc ride over the road again, Swift as lightnin' anti smooth as glass, barky, take yo' ]tat off when the train goes past. , . . Whoop-oo-oo-o, wh000-oo-00.0. whoo, whoa -coo -o -o -o -o, Consider The Lilies From the dawn of eivilizati0li, lilies appear to have been asso- ciated with man. They were an easily available source of food and a conspicuous one by virtue of brilliantly colored. 'flowers. Apparently, as soon as man set- tled down long enough to garden, he cherished lilies. . At the same time, even in these early civilizations, lilies must have had an aesthetic appeal, for remark- ably clear pictures 01 them ap- pear on Cretan pottery made some two thousand years before Christ. An early Egyptian relief, now preserved in Paris, shows women gathering lilies, others pressing them to obtain the es- sential oil... , From Greece, the Madonna lily traveled to Rome.... The women Of Rome used they sap, 'tressed from the same lilies, as a skin - cleansing preparation, and they Or Roman sOldiers carried bulbs On expeditions of conquest throughout Europe. In this way, at the beginning o! the Christian era, the Madonna lily came t4 the countries that are now Ger- many, Holland and England. It was then also that this lily be- came a symbol Of purity and im- portant in religion. Lilies are often mentioned in the Bible, al- though the "lilies of the field" may actually have been iris. , . . Leonardo da Vinci drew a de. tailed pencil sketch of the Ma- donna lily, a flower stock identi- cal with the old-fashioned type still grown in gardens. Later, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, lilies were a favorite subject of famous flower paint- ers. With the passing of the Middle Ages, lilies were valued in gar- dens of the Northern Hemisphere, As new worlds were discovered, they too contributed lilies, plants eagerly sought by amateur gar- deners. Thus soon after the dis- covery of Canada by Jacques Cartier, L, canadense was brought to Paris and London, When trade with Japan and China became possible, lilies were among the first plants im- ported from those countries, With the discovery and develop- ment of the West Coast of North America, the fine lilies growing there were soon ;collected, named and distributed to growers in Other parts Of the world. Lilium candidum, the Madonna lily, and several European species were grown in English gardens as early as 1600. We find L, can- adense described in John Par- kinson's The Garden of Pleasant Flowers, which appeared in 1629. Other lilies grown at that time were L, bulbiferum and L. chal- cedonicum, the Red Martagon of Constantinople. Two hundred years later, in 1832 to be exact,. L. speciesum rubrum arrived from Japan, and after another thirty years, L. auratum, the famous gold -banded lily, Lilium henryi, which exerted such a great influence in our modern garden lilies, did not arrive until 1889, and L. regale was not dis- covered until 1903.—From "The New Book of Lilies," by Jan de Graaff. ..Plain }orse Sense.. by BOB FLUS Ti niskansing, Avg. 8, 1953. In this rugged country studded with shaft heads and piles of tailing, people are rugged too. For them it is not North and South, for them it still is "new" Ontario as compared to the "old" down around Oshawa and Toronto. You can meet many a pioneer who came in here fifty and more years ago when there were no roads or railways and they ihadngs. t0 portage all theiir belong - In those times to carry a hun- dred pound bag of seed. potatoes through twenty miles of bush to a neightbour was considered "just a friendly gesture". Even Money They are tough, they are friendly, they are hospitable, and above all they are outspo- ken. If asked for their opinion, there is no reluctance, no hesi- tancy; you will get it whether you like it or not. Any subject is welcome for discussion, be it economic, religi- ous or political, presently, of course, the political having` the upper hand, Everybody is watching with interest the battle being waged by "Ann" Shipley, rumbustious reevess of Teck and Liberal candidate, against "Doc" Ames, the amiable standard bearer of the CCF. At present it is even money on the two; by the time this re- port appears, we will know who won. Ye Bad Olde Times. In this Northland with its long hard winters, q man has to be on the move, he has to be pro- gressive and aggressive to sur- vive. He has to have a good memory and remember a mis- take, not he repeat it, That is why the Conservatives have nothing to hope for in a district where the people have not forgotten the times when the young folks were riding the rods and the older men were working on the roads, getting paid with cheques marked 'relief,' at the rate of 98 cents per day. Gold, Gold, Gold. It is gold that makes them eat and the bit of land that they work on the side, Down there in 'old' Ontario we always hear of the 'depressed' state of the gold mining industry is in, Coming up here a man ex- pects to find ghost towns and derelict ramshackle buildings, Nothing of the sort. The plants and the administrative buildings look just as rich and prosperous as the headquarters of any bank or insurance company in Toronto or Montreal. And they are paying good dividends. Broulan-Reef, the company struck by the miners for a 10 cent increase on their hourly rate of $1.02, last year paid out zat on of lss $650,000 capitali- zation $900,000. Last Season. There are some good farms in the South end of the district. It is mixed farming with the ac- cent on milk, which is highly valued at $5.20 per hundred- weight, Some good Holsteins and Ayr - shires are roaming the country, with hardly any Jerseys or Guernseys in sight, although there is open quota for high test milk. The season is much later than in 'old' Ontario, of course, The spring grain is still green and a lot of hay has to be brought be yet. Much of it is being put up in the old fashion on stakes which makes for wonderful hay. This column welcomes sug- gestions, wise or Coolish, and all criticism, whether constructive or destructive and will try to answer any question. Address your letters to Bob Ellis, Box 1, 123 - 18th Street. flew Toronto, Ont Banned Pants — Targets of an anti -immodesty campaign by West Berlin teachers, these German schoolgirls were sent home lo change their pedal - pushers -and shorts for skirts. Loud protests were raised by bi- cycle riders when tight -fitting slacks, pedal -pushers and shorts were banned from classrooms.