We had a pretty nice day today - much warmer than it has been, but we didn't get any rain.  It was cold last night, though - got down to 13 degrees - but during the day it got up to about 34.  

We got together with Bill and Diane Rossi and Don and Diane Sherwood last night at the Rossi's.  It was Fred's birthday, and Diane made his favorites for dinner, chicken pie and white cupcakes with chocolate frosting.  It was soooooo good, and we had a great time.  

I know some of you will be surprised that the Sherwoods have been here since just after Christmas, and it hasn't rained yet!  They have brought rainy weather here every year at this time for I don't know how long.  We're glad to see the spell has been broken, and I have to say, bringing snow and great skiing weather this year has helped them regain some status after all those years of being dubbed "rain makers."

Don and Diane told us the cottage next to them belonging to Laurie (Ailes) Maguire has been bought by abutting neighbors Mark and Robin Nicholson.  That is good news as the old Ailes camp is ailing and needs help.  Diane was saying there is a lot going on along the east shore of the pond - Mary Ellen Stover is putting an addition on her camp, then there's the Keach cottage that was removed and there will be a new one in the spring.  Further up the pond there's work going on at the Richey's on North Shore Road, and there may be others she mentioned, but I can't remember.  We haven't been over on that side since early in the fall.  We do know that our neighbor, Henretta Splain, will be moving to her father, Henry Mills's place on Clubhouse Circle within a week or so.  We'll miss Henretta as our neighbor, but I'm sure she'll enjoy her new home, and we'll still see her.

I've been going through a recipe book that belonged to Grandmother Dimick.  It had belonged to her mother, or perhaps even an earlier relative of the May family in St. Johnsbury.  There is a printed recipe book dated 1845, and lots of hand-written recipes on various bits of papers - envelopes, pieces of calendars and letters dated in the early 1900's, so these are definitely old.
Here's the recipe for making yeast:
5 potatoes mashed.  Pour on 1 1/2 pints of boiling water, add 1 pint cold water and 1/3 cup of sugar.  Add 1 cup of yeast, set 5 hours and then bottle.

I was curious, so I searched on line for yeast made from potatoes, and found a slightly different recipe.  I expect more than yeast was made from potatoes back in the day here in Cabot, at least; potatoes were one of the best crops around for many years, and this is still good land for growing them.  There were stills aplenty as well, and I came across detailed plans for making a still when I was working on the Thomas Osgood collection last year.

Another recipe I found today that I particularly liked was for rusks.  These are hard biscuits that were easy to carry in a saddlebag or in a pocket, and they do not go bad, they just get harder.  I think they are the plain country cousins of Italian's traditional almond and lemon flavored biscotti, which I enjoy with my coffee.  This recipe for rusks is unflavored:
One pint of milk, one cup of yeast, one cup of sugar, half a cup of butter and two eggs.  Work up like bread, let it rise, then mould, rise again and bake.

Normally, even plain rusks are twice baked, I believe, which is what makes them dry and hard like biscotti, but this recipe doesn't mention baking time or temperature, so perhaps they were just baked slowly until good and hard.

There are lots of other recipes, and I'll probably transcribe some of them, at least, even though I don't know exactly who used them.  They are probably pretty representative of what people were eating in the mid to late 1800's, and that makes them interesting to me.

I read each scrap of paper - some I couldn't make out very well because the writing had faded with time, but twice I found this quote written neatly at the bottom of a recipe:  "Strength to my weakness - Rest to my weariness" - one had the date of November 8, 1897; the other was at the end of a recipe for "Cake that never fails being perfect," and was dated January 28, 1883.  Tomorrow I'll decide how to preserve these precious old recipes.

Here is the obituary for our friend, Irv Pollack:  Irwin W. Pollack