Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1956-01-19, Page 6TA8LE TALKS dame Andrews. Like to try some Swedish dishes? The following recipes are for a few favorites in the Mand of Sweden, all having the advantage of being simple to prepare,, yet really tasty. I hope you'll like them as much as my family did. * * * SWEDISH PANCAKES 2 eggs • 1 cup flour 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt Beat the eggs well, add flour, milk and salt. Beat again. Let stand two hours before using. Cook on hot greased griddle, using one tablespoon of batter for each cake and turning them only once. Serve with syrup or cranberry sauce. * * * COFFEE CAKE 1cup sugar 34 cup butter 2 eggs separated s/s cup sweet milk 1% cups flour teaspoon baking powder Y,/ teaspoon salt Cream sugar and butter and i31 the beaten yolks. Sift flour with baking powder and salt and add alternately with the milk. Last, fold in the stiffly beaten whites and mix gently. Put into a • pan and pour melted butter on top. Sprinkle witih sugar and cin- namon and a few chopped nuts. Bake 45 minutes at 350°. Thin- ly sliced apples may be pressed into the cake before sprinkling with the sugar and cinnamon. * * * FRUIT SOUP 14 pound prunes 1 cup seeded raisins a pound dried apricots 3 apples, diced 1 lemon, sliced LOSING HIS "SIGHT" — "Fay", cr seeing -eye dog, takes her master out for the last time. Fay, herself, is going blind. She's been guiding Indiana State Sen. Tom Hasbrook, blinded in World War 11, for 12 years. Now she's retiring, and Hashbrook must train a new "eye" dog. aaeseaseaaSeas 1 orange, sliced 1 cup sugar 1 stick cinnamon n tablespoons tapioca Soak dried foods, tapioca, sugar, cinnamon, orange, and lei'non in water to cover, over- night. In the morning add ap- ples, more water and cook until :mit is soft. It is equally de- licious served hot or cold. RICE PUDDING 4 ta''lespoons rice 1/g, cup sugar 1 quart milk, heated Salt to taste 1 stick cinnamon Pour hot milk into a buttered baking dish. Add other ingredi- ents and stir well. Place in a slow oven and bake 3 to 4 hours. Stir in the brown top that forms, several times during the baking. This makes the pudding deli- cious. Let brown the last half hour. Serve warm. or cold with cream. * * ,Y POTATO FLOUR CAKE Separate 8 eggs Beat whites stiff and add 2 cups sugar 8 tablespoons potato flour sifted witih 2 teaspoons baking powder Fold in well -beaten egg yolks last. Mix lightly and bake 10 to 15 minutes h a 350° oven. Cover and fill with whipped cream. Fresh peaches, cut fine, may be placed between - the layers or any other fruit you fancy. Makes 2 layers, Found Ibis Penny Should you ever meet genial Tom Perry he'll 'probably tell you the strenge-but-true story of his war penny. It begins when Tom was sheltering from German artil- Iery fire in the cellar of a deserted farm house near Pecq, just over the French border in Belgium. He chanced to put his hand in his pocket' arid found it contained just one penny, a King George V 1914 penny. Acting on impulse, he put it in a chink in the cellar wall. Along came the 1918 Armis- tice, he was demobbed and re. turned home to a job in a War- wickshire office. Then one day he thought of that penny and was suddenly curious to know whether it was still where he had placed it. Years passed, but Tom didn't forget the penny. He went for a holiday on the Continent in 1954 and spent quite a lot of time and money trying to locate that old farmhouse. He failed, but decided to have another go in 1955. • Back on the Continent he tramped many more miles in a further search for the farm- house. Then he suddenly noticed a familiar landmark, and ten minutes later he had found the farmhouse. It wasn't difficult to persuade the friendly but surprised farm- er to let him visit the cellar. There, sure enough, Tom found the penny exactly where he had left it. Said Tom, now fifty-seven: "The farmer listened goggle- eyed when I told him the story. Then we celebrated, with home - brewed, beer." BIRD -FEEDING HOBBY PAYS OFF — C. R. Likins, almost 75 years. old, retired in 1950 as an aircraft inspector and has since par ayed his nobby into a new business — building "scientific" bird feeders. He's shown above inspecting some of his colorful r'restaurants" in his workshop. In action now from Canada to Texas, Likin's feeders consist of citrus, tomato juice, pickle and lard cans for containers and cut-up coat hangers far "working parts/' Metal "Gane" awnings protect birds from the rain, His feeders holdfrom a pint to as much as 50 pounds of food. He says birds he feeds eat up to 40 pounds of food a week, 1 THEY PROMISE 1956 WILL BE LOVELY—Whether you pick the sweet dream at left or the queen of sophistication at right, 1956 is going to be lovely to watch -- on calendars, that is. They're typical beauties of Shaw -Barton calendar manufacturers, who are responsible for a great share of the 125 million calendars distributed by businessmen throughout the nation this year. What Pioneer Sod Looked Like In reading descriptions of life of the prairies in the days of the pioneers we often find "sod houses" mentioned. But very few of us have any idea of what. these houses really were—how they were built and what they were Iike to live in. So the fol- lowing report from The Chris- tiau Science Minitor should give us a better idea of how many Canadians of an earlier gener- ation "made do with what they had." ,* * *. Twice on a trip across Kan- sas a tourist may . see examples now of how thousands and thou- sands of pioneers in Canada and the United States lived before wooden dwellings became com- mon on the treeless prairies. Until railroads and -other transportation brought lumber within his reach, the home- steader and his family frequent- ' ly lived in a "sod house." In the northwest 'corner of Kansas, about 50 miles from the Colorado boundary and a little nearer the Nebraska line, a group of residents have 'con- structed a` full-size sod house to illustrate that type of dwelling. It has proved to be a strong tourist attraction. Driving from the east, a tra- • yeller will get his first introduc- tion to the sod house at Topeka, the state capital, where the Kan- sas State Historical. Society has prepared in its museum an ex- hibit of the interior of a sod house of the 1880's as one of a series of "period rooms." That the museum, consider- ing the weight on its floors, has not undertaken a full reproduc- tion of the sod house is under- standable when it is noted - that the walls and roof of the house in Colby contain an estimated 89 tons of earth besides the lum- ber in door and window frames and roof poles. Sod houses were made by breaking long strips of soil with a spade or sod plow and cutting it into bricks two on three feet long, about one foot thick. In these the earthwas held to- gether by the thickly matted roots of the prairie grass. The blocks were laid with staggered joints, sod side down, and cracks were filled with clay, The roof was sheathed with brush, prairie grass, and a layer of sod and clay. In the case of the exhibit at Topeka the inside walls are papered with old newspapers, following a widespread practice which, as Miss Joan Foth, as- sistant director of the museum, remarks, "represented' a some- what futile . effort to keep the dirt and mud from seeping into the house." The newspapers used for this wall covering are all from the historical society's extensive col- lection of papers of the 1870's and '80's. The Colby house interior is just a bit more fancy in that it has a plastered wall. The plaster was applied directly to the sod without any lath after the ex- cess grass was singed off with a torch. The window and door frames and rafters were fastened to the sod by long, hand -whit- tled wooden nails. This sod house, an authentic restoration of a typical pioneer house, was built on the fair- grounds at Colby in 1953, It re- placed a smaller one built there 20 years earlier by actual home- steaders as a headquarters for their reunions during county fairs. Under the homestead law the minimum requirement in order to establish ownership of land was a dwelling 12 feet square with a door and window, The Topeka exhibit room measures 16 by 12 and the house at Colby I Reuses' Is somewhat larger. It stands entirely above ground, whereas some "soddies" were of a semi - dugout type, Again attempting to be true of history, both the Topeka and the Colby examples are filled with a great amount of para- phernalia. "Since a family ate, slept and lived in this one room," says Miss Foth, "it is fairly clut- tered." The historical society's room includes a table of rough, unfin- ished walnut once used in a Kansas pioneer home, chairs that were brought west in a cov- ered wagon, a buffalo hide for. a floor rug, blanket rollsr;' wash- stand, candles and oil lamps, and kitchen utensils made by hand. The Colby house likewise con- tains a cast iron cookstove, fuel box, wash board, crank -type churn, butter molds, kraut cut- ter, old guns, powder horns, ox shoes, a rocking .chair, an organ, and a soapstone griddle that re- quired no grease to fry pan- cakes. Although a sod house lacked ,many of the refinements of later frame dwellings, old-timers re- call that it had a number of, advantages and was not as un- comfortable as some may sup- pose. Its walls represented a highly effectivetype of insulation, so that it was cool in summer and. relatively warm in winter. The earth floor made housekeeping difficult, but when a terrifying prairie fire swept over the coun- try it was a refuge that would- n't burn. Itis thought that more than a .million sod -built houses enc. dotted the' western plains front Canada to Mexico, but so far as Mr. Kear knows, only 11 of them remain. Such a house could be built in a few days if all went well, but unless carefully tended it might not last more than five or 10 years. 'UNFAIR; Sitting at home, having a quiet evening, were two spinster sis- ters. Suddenly one looked up from the paper she was reading and commented; "There's an article here telling of the death of a wornan's third husband, She has had all of them cre- mated" "Isn't that life for you?" said the other. "Some of us can't even get one husband, while others have husbands to burn." PLAYS A BEAUTY — using descriptions supplied by Homer in "The Iliad," Warner Brothers has selected Rossano Podesta to portray "the most beautiful woman in the world." The Italian actress will star in "Helen of Troy." She is cur- rently doubling with Alan Ladd in "Santiago". Grand Salute To Theatre's First Lady By DICE KLEINER NEA. Staff Correspondent New. York — CNEA) — When Helen Hayes first heard some talk that theater people were going to honor her for her 50. years of acting, she was shock- ed. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "It just didn't seem like 50 years. I don't keep a diary or records or a scrapbook, and I'd never kept track of the years. It made me feel old." In fact, her husband, play- wright' Charles MacArthur, at first opposed the plans for a "Command Performance" of theater people to highlight the anniversary celebration: He thought it would make Helen Hayes "feel decrepit." "But I don't feel decrepit,", she says, with the laugh that Ina charmed theater audiences since 1905. And she doesn't look decrepit, She looks pretty much like what she is — a charming 55 -year-old wife and mother, who just happens to be one of the finest actresses the Ameri- can stage has produced. She started acting as a child in her native Washington, D.C. Then she was seen by Lewis Fields, one of New York's lead- ing producers of that era. And by the time she was a teen- ager, she was a star. She man- agedto make the transition from adolescence to maturity painlessly, and for the last two decades has been almost uni- versally recognized as the First Lady of the Stage. Looking back on her half - century of acting, Helen Hayes thinks she's had a pretty full and exciting career, "I have no unfulfilled ambi- tions," she • says. "I've done about everything I wanted to — more than I dreamed I would do. I've had a few cracks at Shakespeare, With varying re - suits. I've made movies, and wori an Oscar. I have no re- grets." Miss Hayes, as you might ex- pect from a woman who doesn't keep . scrapbooks, says, "I never look back over my shoulder -- 1 prefer to look ahead." And, from that vantage point, she thinks the theater is in healthy shape at the moment. "Of course it has dwindled in quantity," she says, "but the quality is better than it was. my contemporaries — people like Lynn Fontainne and Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson — we used to wonder when young actresses would come along and elbow us out of the way, as we elbowed the older stars out. For years, there was no one. "But look now fine actres- ses Eke 'uIie Harris and that young Susan Strassberg and young actors like. Marlon Bran - do and Montgomery• Clift. And fine playwrights like Arthur Mil- ler and Tennessee Williams -and Robert Anderson. The theater is very strong today" And there's television. She, thinks it's wonderful—and . par- ticularly good as a training ground for young performers. "It's much harder to get started in the theater today, be- cause there is less theater. And there used to be stock com- panies, too. But now television gives a young actor a chance to try different kinds of parts. The only trouble is TV always wants new faces - outside of Maria Riva and Eva Marie Saint, they haven't dveloped any stars. An actor can be washed up on TV at 25." Helen Hayes' career has been a newsy one, in a non -scandal- ous sort of way. She was close- ly involved with the actors' strike that established Actors' Equity as a potent theatrical force. And there was the famous "Act of God" baby, her daugh- ter, whose birth she maintained was an "Act of God" and there- fore she should be released from an existing run -of -play contract. Years later, there was the tragic death of this child from polio'. But mostly it's her talent that's made ` her famous. Over the years, she's run the histri- onic gamut from comedy to tra- gedy, played parts as varied as Pollyanna and Cleopatra, ap- peared with leading men like John Drew, William Gillette, Alfred Lunt, Sidney Blackmer, Philip Merivale, Maurice. Evans, and, in the movies, Ronald Col- man, Clark Gable, Ramon No- varro, Robert Montgomery and Gary Cooper. Probably her best-known characterizations were in "Dear Brutus," "Bab" (her first star- ring ' part), "To the Ladies," "She Stoops to Conquer," Mag- gie in "What Every . Woman Knows," "Mary of Scotland," "Victoria Regina," "Harriet" and her recent appearance in "The Skin of Our Teeth" in Paris and New York and on television. When Barry Hyams, the press agent for "The Skin of Our Teeth," unearthed the fact that her 50th theatrical birthday was nearing and the plans for the Celebration were proposed, Helen Hayes says she wasn't sure what her reaction would be. "I would vacillate," she says, "between. wanting to do some- thing great on Broadway to show my appreciation, and a de- sire to go somewhere and rest." She's decided to rest. But her idea of rest is four weeks in Florida, during which she'll spend. one week acting in "The Glass. Menagerie" in Mia- mi. Then she'll come back to on a new play — "Cock -a - Doodle Daisy," written by her husband and Anita Loos, After 50 years, there's no rea- son to expect she'll quit -now. SALUTE TO HER CAREER Alone on the bare stage of the Helett Hayes Theatre in New York, actress Helen Hayes reads words of congratulations after theatre was named in her honor.