Want: Apple Slum(p)

The arrangement of Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants is perhaps curiously genderless. In an era rife with books specifically for “ladies” and books specifically for “gentlemen,” the Dictionary intersperses without comment chapters devoted to traditionally masculine and feminine tasks—hunting with cooking and baking; farming with preserving food; carpentry with making clothes; and metalwork with washing, bleaching, and dyeing. Some specific chapters have even more all-encompassing appeal: the one devoted to toilet practices hops back and forth between freckle-bleaching methods for the ladies and whisker-growing techniques for the gentlemen.

It’s unclear just how Dr. Alexander Youman wrote with equal confidence about setting up a new beehive and finding the best homemade mascara, but he seems to have done so. Or was Mrs. Youman laboring quietly at his side?

As a lifelong New Englander I wish I could say I immediately spotted the potential typo in the title of today’s entry, but I’ve never heard of apple slum or apple slump. It seems to be a regional dish that’s still fairly common, a close (and tasty-looking) cousin to the buckles and crumbles that have become popular on the farmer’s market circuit around here. With the fluid nature of recipe titles over the years I’m not sure that we can call “slum” a error, but today this dish is definitively “apple slump.”

Youman’s recipe is painfully vague for cooks like me, who specialize in Kraft-based dishes. But for the day it was par for the course—standardized measurements and truly step-by-step recipes wouldn’t be common for another fourteen years, until the publication of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-school Cook Book.

It turns out that apple slump was a favorite of Louisa May Alcott’s family; a fancy calligraphy version of the recipe is even sold online and at the gift shop of Alcott’s Orchard House. A number of modern cooks have posted about their experiences with the recipe, which are fun to read—from the foodie to the traditional to the Rachel Ray (!).

Want: Harmless wallpaper

As someone who grew up in a house lousy with 70s-era wallpaper, I am amazed to realize that some people actually put the stuff in their homes on purpose. The little-drummer boy–themed print in my childhood bedroom may be at the root of any number of commitment issues—I know what it means to live with something for the long term, after all.

But A. E. Youman’s contemporaries had even better reasons to avoid wallpaper: it could kill them. According to Bill Bryson’s almost unspeakably wonderful 2010 book At Home, in the late nineteenth century 80 percent of English wallpapers contained arsenic. Although it had long been known (and used) as a poison, the element nonetheless turned up in green-hued wallpaper and paints, patent medicines, and face powders.

Symptoms of arsenic poisoning begin with headaches, disorientation, and drowsiness, and progress to diarrhea, vomiting, cramping muscles, hair loss, and stomach pain. From there, you run into the most well-known symptom of arsenic poisoning: death.

No wonder, then, that the Dictionary of Every-day Wants includes an entry on spotting this potential killer.

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All those constitutional trips to the countryside in Victorian novels are probably the direct result of environmental poisoning—if your wallpaper is making you sick, the best treatment probably really is a vacation. Bryson notes that Fredrick Law Olmstead, designer of New York’s Central Park, found his cure a bit more simply: he moved to the bedroom across the hall.

There was one bright side to an arsenic-scented boudoir, though: rooms with green wallpaper were rarely host to bedbugs.

Want: Un-funny Money

If memory serves, my sophomore American history class covered nothing more than a bunch of grown men bickering about how to back paper money. I’m sure other things came up, but that particular bit of history was so spectacularly, profoundly, mind-numbingly dull that it stands out even all these years later.

In the hands of our dear friend A. E. Youman, though, the finer points of early American currency take on a sense of immediacy. He got to the meat of the issue: Was it real, or was it fake?

In 1860, more than 8,000 American banks were issuing bills. (Everybody but the federal government was at it, it seems.) This made the Civil War era an excellent time to be a forger of paper money in America, if not a user of paper money. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a third all paper money in circulation in 1865 was counterfeit.

Part of the problem was that each of these 8,000 banks designed its own bills, creating a wild diversity of styles and making it almost impossible to tell what was real. The Coin Site says, “The earliest notes are rather plain but as the need for anti-counterfeiting methods arose, talented artists were employed to create intricate vignettes that were difficult to duplicate. The vignettes are the most attractive to collectors since they show life during the period in which the notes were produced. There are hundreds of scenes, including those representing agriculture, industry and commerce and showing sailing ships, farms, antique trains, geography as well as allegorical representations of Faith, Hope, Justice, Liberty and Peace. The notes are often multi-colored and in high grade, are quite beautiful.”

This counterfeiting free-for-all supposedly ended with the passage of the National Bank Act in 1863—almost 10 years before Youman’s book hit shelves. (After this, banks were still licensed to print money, but the government controlled most of the bill’s design, making them harder to fake.) In 1865, the Secret Service was founded to further control forgery.

These efforts didn’t quite do the job, if we believe Youman. In this 1872(ish) entry, he warns readers not only to check the quality of the bill and its printing, but also to be sure it wasn’t issued by a broken bank—one that had gone belly up, apparently taking with it the currency it had printed. 

(P.S.: If I’d spent as much time on my American history homework as I did on this post, I’d probably be president by now.)

Want: A Taste for Farm Life

James Johnston, a British agriculturist, wrote in his 1851 Notes on North America:

As yet in New England and New York [there is] scarcely any such thing as local attachment — the love of a place, because it is a man’s own, because he has hewed it out of the wilderness, and made it what it is; or because his father did so, and he and his family have been born and brought up, and spent their happy youthful days upon it. Speaking generally, every farm from Eastport in Maine, to Buffalo on Lake Erie, is for sale.

Apparently Mr. Johnston wasn’t kidding. By the 1872(ish) publication of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, Victorian-era brain drain must have been a serious concern indeed: The book’s farming chapter includes more than just the practical advice you’d expect for things like getting rid of ants and cultivating barley. It also provides this best-practices entry for inspiring a boy to love his family’s farm.

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As for the farmer’s daughter? I guess Youman expected her to know her place—this entry is indexed as “boys, to attach to farm life.” There is no index entry for “girls.”

Want: Raising the Dead

Today’s want is too fabulous for just one commentator. So, without further ado, I present comments from two.

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LAW

Basically, I see the “drowned man” want as a perfect example of mid-nineteenth-century faith in science, technology, and progress. The emphasis on measurement, for example, and on the technical and procedural details of the process, offers a “real world” example of the mindset portrayed in nineteenth-century speculative fiction (think of Dr. Frankenstein, or the works of Jules Verne). Scientific experimentation is open to amateurs in all walks of life, and a “scientific” way of proceeding ensures effective results—whether in the lab, on the farm, or in the household. How many agricultural manuals and manuals of “domestic science” share Youmans’ mindset as shown in this “want”?

AMANDA

In contrast, Youman’s can-do attitude (“Missing corpse? I’m so on it.”) makes me think of the can’t-do attitude I share with many modern Americans (“Missing corpse? If they haven’t posted about it on Gawker yet, I don’t know anything about it”).

In the days of slow travel and even slower communications, people were really on their own. A lost swimmer today would be the realm of official search parties, helicopter pilots, and professional divers—not a mad bomber risking a Tarantino-esque tidal wave of gore on the off chance that an explosion might free a hung-up corpse.

  

Self-sufficiency was clearly more common for Youman and his contemporaries—they were up for sowing the grain, making the soap, and shoeing the horse, even if they needed a book to tell them how. On the other hand, we modern types are so embedded in and dependent on our culture and government that self-sufficiency is the most terrifying of boogeymen. No 911? No Price Chopper? No income tax return? No thanks.

This entry actually makes me think of today’s crazed proliferation of end-of-the-world-ism. From The World without Us to vampire apocalypses to yet another rehash of Nostradamus’s more dire prophecies (complete with “tasteful” reenactments), you can’t read a book or turn on a television without running into doomsday portents. At the heart of this fascination with the end of all things, I think, lurks a fond dependency on the status quo that Youman probably couldn’t even imagine.

Want: Weather Prognostication

In honor of New England’s Never-Ending Winter from Hell, today’s want covers the foibles of predicting the weather in the 1870s.

A few years ago I read somewhere that predicting the weather was once seen as a form of magic. This really baked my noodle—Willard Scott? A magician? But of course, before the modern era of science and technology our (reasonably) accurate ten-day forecast was unthinkable; instead weather was the realm of anecdote and observation. Which, it seems, is where cats’ toilet habits came into the equation.

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If we took the Deloreon 139 years into the future, I wonder what everyday things would seem like magic to us?

Want: Manuscript Preparation

As previously noted, there are a lot of things I have no idea how to do. There is, however, one thing that I can do the heck out of: prepare manuscripts for publication. That’s my specialization in the dizzying array of things people do with their work lives these days—shepherding an author’s original manuscript into printed book form.

And guess what? Alexander Youman clearly knew how to do it, too. He published at least one book, and a whopper at that—from “accidents and emergencies” on page 1 to “writing, for the press” on page 520, it's clear he had a lot to say. And from “manuscript, preparation of” on page 483, it’s clear to me that he knew what he was talking about.

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Replace “fair hand”  with “Times New Roman, 12” and you have, in a nutshell, manuscript submission guidelines suitable for 2011.