April 2, 1867: Happy birthday, Eugen Sandow! A Victorian celebrity epitomizing masculine beauty, Sandow's book Strength and How To Obtain It is a classic in body-building circles. For a modern biography of Sandow, see The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman.
April 2, 1877: Fourteen-year-old aerialist Rosa Matilda Richter, stagename "Zazel", debuts at a performance in London and is the first to perform the circus act of being "shot out of a cannon". <https://tinyurl.com/y8k43wtn>
April 14, 1883: The Boston Casino declared "Bicycler's Day." Wheelmen in cycling uniforms were admitted free. There were races, and a special supper was given to the cyclists. Source: The Wheelmen, June, 1883, p. 231.
Read more about Victorian Cycling: http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/cycling.html
April 14, 1884: Karl Kron recorded his 10,000th mile on a bicycle. His book about his experiences, "Ten Thousand Miles On A Bicycle" can be found here: <http://tinyurl.com/h2pljur> Karl Kron preferred riding alone to cycling in groups, and he had a quirky sense of humor: he dedicated his book to his bulldog Curl, "The best bulldog ever".
Read more about Victorian Cycling: http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/cycling.html
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April 15, 1874: American socialite Jennie Jerome marries Britain's Lord Randolph Churchill.
April 15th, 2017: Emma Morano, the last living person to be born in the 1800s, passes away peacefully in her home in Italy. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/last-surviving-person-born-in-1800s-dies-at-117/>
April 22, 1884: cycling great Thomas Stevens starts on his around the world tour. He would be the first person ever to travel around the world on a bicycle, and his book about his adventures has become a classic in cycling circles: Around the World On A Bicycle.
Some images from Stevens' book —enjoy!
Read more about Victorian Cycling: http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/cycling.html
And of course, don't forget my cycling club series, The Tales of Chetzemoka!
April 29, 1879: Inventor Charles Brush holds the first public demonstration of an arc lamp for electric street lighting. <https://clevelandmagazine.com/cleader/government/articles/cleveland-was-the-first-city-of-light>
More on arc lights: <https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/under-the-moonlight/>
Special days in April:
April 1, 2018: Happy Easter!
EASTER BUNS
Ellsworth, Mrs. M.W. Queen of the Household. Ellsworth & Brey: Detroit, Michigan, 1899. p. 17
"Three cups sweet milk, 1 cup yeast; flour to make think batter. Set this as a sponge over night. In the morning add 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup butter, melted, 1/2 nutmeg, 1 saltspoon salt. Flour enough to roll out like biscuit. Knead well and set to rise 5 hours. Roll 1/2 inch thick, cut into round cakes, and lay in rows on a buttered baking-pan. When they have stood 1/2 hour, make a cross upon each with a knife, and put instantly into the oven. Bake to a light brown, and brush over with a feather or soft bit of rag, dipped in the white of an egg, beaten up stiff with white sugar. These are the "hot cross-buns" of the "London cries."
Notes / My version:
N.B. When a Victorian recipe seems to call for an inordinate amount of yeast, it's a sure bet the author meant home-made yeast, i.e., sourdough starter.
3 cups milk
1 cup sourdough starter
10 cups all purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 tsp. salt
2 1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1 egg white
1/4 cup powdered sugar
Mix the milk, sourdough starter, and 4 cups of flour in a very large mixing bowl. Cover with a towel and let rise overnight.
In the morning, melt the butter; add it and the sugar, nutmeg, salt and the other 6 cups of flour to the sponge. Knead well, then return to the bowl and let rise in a warm place 5 hours. After this, be sure to treat the dough VERY GENTLY or you will force out all the air bubbles, resulting in heavy buns.
Transfer the dough to a floured surface and GENTLY roll it out, then cut with a round cutter.
Bake at 375 degrees until golden brown.
Frosting: While the buns bake, mix the egg white and powdered sugar, then beat until stiff. As soon as the buns come out of the oven, make frosting crosses on top of each one using a feather, clean cloth, or clean paintbrush.
April 1st: April Fool's Day. Historical comics scanned from our collection: <http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/historic-comics.html>
April 8—14th, 2018: National Library Week <http://www.ala.org/conferencesevents/celebrationweeks#nlw>
Some of our favorite books: <www.thisvictorianlife.com/favorite-books-etc.html>
"It is an excellent thing for every young person of literary inclination to begin early the collection of a private library. I do not see why women should not make this an object in life." —W.H. Venable, 1872.
"Every home should start a small library, to which additions can be made continually." —Annie Randall White, 1891.
"The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul." —Paxton Hood, 19th-century.
"A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a young man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life." —Anonymous, 1889.
"Among the earliest ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and indeed, among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, is that of owning, and constantly adding to, a library of good books." —Anonymous, 1889.
April 16th: Feast day of St. Drogo, patron saint of tea and coffee drinkers.
19th-century instructions for making coffee and tea. (These appear in the appendix of Delivery Delayed, Book IV of the Tales of Chetzemoka series, along with recipes for all the other foods mentioned in the story!)
Coffee
Beeton, Mrs. Isabella. The Book of Household Management. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden, Limited, 1893. #2644, p. 1185.
"It would be impossible, in the space at our command, to enumerate the various modes adopted in different countries for "making coffee;" that is, the phrase commonly understood to mean the complete preparation of this delicious beverage for drinking. For performing this operation, such recipes or methods as we have found most practical will be inserted in their proper place…"
Filtered or drip coffee
The Capitol Cookbook. Chicago: The Werner Company, 1896, p. 398.
"For each person allow a large tablespoonful of finely ground coffee, and to every tablespoonful allow a cupful of boiling water.
Have a small iron ring made to fit the top of the coffee-pot inside, and to this ring sew a small muslin bag (the muslin for this purpose must not be too thin). Fit the bag into the pot, pour some boiling water in it, and, when the pot is well-warmed, put the ground coffee into the bag; pour over as much boiling water as is required, close the lid, and, when all the water has filtered through, remove the bag, and send the coffee to table. Making it in this manner prevents the necessity of pouring the coffee from one vessel to another, which cools and spoils it. The water should be poured on the coffee gradually so that the infusion may be stronger; and the bag must be well made that none of the grounds may escape through the seams and so make the coffee thick and muddy.
Patent coffee-pots on this principle can be purchased at most house-furnishing stores."
***
Coffee
Café Noir
"Six Cups of Coffee: Prepared for the Public Palate." Corson, Juliet. Good Housekeeping. June 25, 1887, p. 81.
"This beverage, called after-dinner or black coffee, is made clear and strong, being allowed to reach the boiling point, but not to boil. The usual proportions are one cupful (or four ounces) of coffee to a quart of water. If made in a percolator, a half additional of this quantity of coffee should be allowed; that is, six ounces to a quart."
***
Tea
Ellsworth, Mrs. M.W. Queen of the Household. Ellsworth & Brey: Detroit, Michigan, 1899. pp. 218—219.
"We find the following eminently sensible lines in Household Hints:
"One of the most surprising things one constantly meets is to find that the people who have the same duties to perform, day after day, or year after year, do not improve in their method, or even once blunder into the right way of doing them. Nothing is more easily made than good tea, and yet how seldom, away from home, does one enjoy delicately fragrant tea, which Hawthorne calls 'an angel's gift,' and which Miss Mitford said she could be awake all night drinking. The first thing needed is a clean tea-pot; it is useless to try to make good tea in a rusty pot, or one in which the leaves have been allowed to remain all night. The water should be boiling, but the tea itself should never boil. I wish these words could be painted on the wall of every hotel and restaurant kitchen in the United States. After the boiling water has been poured over the tea, set the tea-pot on an extra griddle at the back of the stove. All that is good in the tea will be gradually extracted from it; then when brought to the table one may well echo De Quincey's wish for an 'eternal tea-pot,' though not inclined to follow his example of drinking it from 8 o'clock in the evening until 4 o'clock in the morning.
"The most satisfactory steeper I ever used is an old-fashioned brown earthen tea-pot. This may be kept perfectly clean with almost no trouble. Whatever may be said of the hurtfulness of tea, when immoderately used, a cup of the afternoon tea so frequently mentioned in novels and essays is an unpurchasable luxury. Hamerton says in 'The Intellectual Life:' 'If tea is a safe stimulant it is certainly an agreeable one; there seems to be no valid reason why brain-workers should refuse themselves this solace.'"
Put tea and coffee away in air-tight receptacles as soon as they are brought into the house. They lose much of their flavor by standing uncovered."
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April 27, 2018: Arbor Day
History of Arbor Day
From Suggestive Programs for Special Day Exercises, 1898:
We are told that the custom of tree planting is an old one among the Germans, who in the rural districts practice a commendable habit of having each member of the family plant a tree at Whitsuntide, which comes forty days after Easter.
The old Mexican Indians also plant trees on certain days of the year when the moon is full, naming them after their children; and the ancient Aztecs are said to have planted a tree every time a child was born, giving it the name of the child.
But to the Hon. J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, Secretary of Agriculture in the Cleveland cabinet, belongs the honor of instituting our American Arbor Day. It was at an annual meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture, held in the ciyt of Lincoln, January 4, 1872, that Mr. Morton introduced the following resolution:
Resolved, That Wednesday the 10th day of April, 1872, be and the same is hereby especially set apart and consecrated for tree planting in the state of Nebraska, and the State Board of Agriculture hereby name it Arbor Day, and to urge upon the people of the state the vital importance of tree planting, hereby offer a special premium of one hundred dollars to the agricultural socieyt of that county in Nebraska which shall upon that day plant properly the largest number of trees; and a farm library of twenty-five dollars worth of books to that person, who on that day, shall plant properly, in Nebraska, the greatest number of trees.
After a little debate as to the name, some preferring Sylvan instead of Arbor, the resolution was unanimously adopted. A second resolution was likewise adopted, asking hte newspapers of the state to keep the matter constantly before the people until the appointed day; and the result was the planting of over a million trees in Nebraska on April 10, 1872.
From this beginning on that western prairie the movement has spread in an ever widening circle whose circumference today sweeps from the Atlantic to the Pacific, while all appreciate the poet's thought:
"What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants in sap and leaf and wood,
In love of home and loyalty,
And far-cast thought of civic good,
His blessing of the neighborhood,--
Who in the hollow of his hand
Holds all the growth of all our land:
A Nation's growth from sea to sea
Stirs in his heart who plants a tree."
Find out the symbolism of various trees by looking them up in this 1891 piece on the Language of Flowers: <http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/language-and-sentiment-of-flowers-1891.html>
PROVISIONS IN SEASON IN APRIL
From Isabella Beeton's The Book of Household Management, pages 123-126.
Vegetables. - Broccoli, celery, lettuces, young onions, parsnips, radishes, small salad, sea-kale, spinach, sprouts - various herbs.
Fruit.- Apples, nuts, forced cherries, green gooseberries, &c., for tarts, rhubarb; dried fruits, crystallized preserves."
***
In a seaport town in the late 19th-century Pacific Northwest, a group of friends find themselves drawn together —by chance, by love, and by the marvelous changes their world is undergoing. In the process, they learn that the family we choose can be just as important as the ones we're born into. Join their adventures in
The Tales of Chetzemoka
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