If I were he, I would be very hungry at the end of it all. I think he fully deserves his feast! Luckily, there are some people out there making really good things for St. Anthony (and the rest of us) to consider eating on his day. One of my favorite food bloggers has some great food ready – wander over to Peter Battaglia’s A Food Obsession to see it! And two more of the best bloggers on Greek food, life, history and culture I know also have a different and fascinating food offering for St. Anthony’s Day – one I particularly like. You might too if you visit Maria Verivaki’s Organically Cooked and Mariana Kavroulaki’s History of Greek Food.

Here we have yet another painting with the ubiquitous fly on the loaf of bread. This time I’m not going to try to discover the meaning of this. I’m just going to assume that the painter believed in realism so intensely that the instant of the fly’s settling became a part of the piece forever. Alternately maybe he found a dead fly and stuck it on so as to relive that moment over and over as he painted, the moment the fly so carelessly lit, before taking flight again mostly likely a few seconds later.

But what is that pile of letters? Has the painter gone mad from inhaling paint and turpentine fumes, is he imagining the alphabet toppling over sideways on the table next to his roast bird? Is this a prelude to surrealism?

No, it isn’t. It is actually a cake. Or it may be the beginnings of the cake, really. The cake itself is called ‘lettergebak’ or ‘letterbanket’ and it is made for St. Nicolas’ birthday on December 6.

Every Saint Nicholas day each family bakes a cake shaped like the letter of each person in the families’ first name; these cakes are called (letterbanket).

I love the way these letters look! You will find a recipe at this site. These appear to be filled with almond paste. I can find absolutely nothing wrong with that idea at all.

Happy Birthday, St. Nick!

It all started with a word. I don’t know where I saw the word, but the word was ‘butterwife’.

The word fascinated me. What was a butterwife? I knew it was not an alewife which is a fish, nor a fishwife who is a person who alternately shrieks in scathing tones and/or is a woman who sells fish whom supposedly is married not to a fishhusband (which would seem to make the most sense) but to a fisherman.

I started down a slippery slope of butteryness. Let me take you along with me as I traverse the path as it wound gently and oleaginously forward.

Butter wife, a woman who makes or sells butter; -- called
        also butter woman. [Obs. or Archaic]
        [1913 Webster]

Notes from one butter-wife:

“We bought a 11-acre farm; my husband was a good dairyman and a first class butter maker, but we could scarcely pay taxes and interest and live, until I took up crochet work. I managed thus to pay $200 on the mortgage every year, but the strain was too great, and overwork ruined my health—but the mortgage was paid. Meantime I have had only one new hat in eight years and one secondhand dress, earned by lace work. We are of the better class and have to keep up appearances, but the struggle is heartbreaking and health destroying. We have worked night and day. Our two sons have had to give up a higher education to work, and both have decided mechanical and constructive ability.”

“Suggest some feasible plan for caring for the farm help without making them a part of the family. Many of them are dirty, vulgar, profane, and drunken, yet they eat at table with us; our children listen to and become familiar with their drunken babblings. Our privacy is destroyed, our tastes and sense of decency are outraged. We are forced to wait upon and clean up after men who would not be allowed to enter the houses of men of any other vocation. Do not misunderstand; the farmers’ wives care little for social status. It is not because they are hired men that we wish them banished, but because oftentimes they are personally unworthy.”

I have to admit . . . when I read foodies gush about how wonderful it is to make their own butter I think of these other women from another time.

The tools above are used in buttermaking.

Of course there is always a flip-side. In butter the flip-side (on a couple of different levels) takes form in the shape of this margarine dragon!

Being buttery, butter is a natural political companion. From President Taft’s White House Cow (which is much like President Obama’s White House Garden!) to Teddy Roosevelt, who in his autobiography (in the chapter ‘Practical Politics’) mentions butter and apparently thumps his fist on the table while doing so

bread for myself and my family. I had enough to get bread. What I had to do, if I wanted butter and jam, was to provide the butter and jam, but to count their cost…

At the end of following along all this and getting quite buttery about it all, I came across something which made me re-think things. Would I really want to be a butterwife when instead I might be able to be a milkseller? If I were a milkseller I could have an adorable donkey and we all could stand in the middle of a charming little green hayfield in Cologne. How romantic! The possibilities in life are always worth thinking about, don’t you agree?

Women in aprons are one thing, of course. And men in aprons are yet another. Whether we are all the same under the aprons is an idea available for musing upon, naturally.

I’ve been hanging around with a guy in an apron, at least on the pages of a book. Hyacinth of ‘The Princess Casamassima’ has been with me every night recently as my head hits the pillow before falling asleep. At this point, that translates to 447 pages of him – with still a bit to go till the story ends at page 591. Hyacinth wears an apron when he works as a fine bookbinder – and the aprons of his co-workers in the small shabby shop figure in the narrative which is supposedly about a princess but really about a short Englishman who is really a Frenchman in ways. But back to aprons!  Here are some to look at:

No aprons for cooking! That surprised me a bit. I think of cooking first, really, when I think of aprons.

Herring with bread, beer, scallions and  . . .  a beetle??

Herring with dried out black bread, a gloomy potato and a glum turnip

Pickled herring as food and as delightful frame for what looks like a gravestone

It’s difficult to decide in this piece whether the ham and the herring are about to bite each other, marry each other, or waltz together.

Here we have our herring ready to eat with onion, apple, walnut, and yet another insect, this time a big flying one rather than a beetle.

The herringpackers are obviously working very fast to get all these herrings to the table. It looks as if one of them expired on top of a pile of herring. Maybe he’s just taking a nap. I don’t blame him.

I have to wonder whether any of these paintings are sophistical refutations. Red herring, anyone?