The Pawtuxet General | Episode 10

Episode ten. Greetings and welcome to the Pawtuxet General. This week, we have the finale of our holiday series, with several tasty additions. Our recipe is a family one, for ginger snaps, perfect for a post-shoveling break or a cozy treat, while someone else knows the beat. Our drink has two versions, one old fashioned and one vegan. Let's tackle eggnog. Then, you need to tuck in for the last installment of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. But first, a shout out to our Patreon subscribers this year. We cannot fully express how much help you are, even a small $5 amount makes so much difference. You make us blush. Your show of support. So this week we have special treats just for you, including recipes and photos from Pawtuxet Village. Check out our Patreon page, to find out how to get a mug and bumper sticker with a Pawtuxet sunrise. Put away the holiday platters, glasses, worries and silver, take joy and the beauty of no sparkle. Settle in for a winter's silence. All right! Let's start with Grammy's ginger cookies. These ginger cookies were the cornerstone of Christmas cookies at Grammy and grandpa's house. For me, the smell brings me back to being just tall enough to reach up and steal one and run away. As children, we were allowed to help roll out the little balls at the kitchen table. This small act builds solidarity, between the cousins. We chatted, were silly, and rolled. These are meant to be eaten with a cup of tea. However, it would be lovely with eggnog, as well. Yummy! First, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. You will need three quarters of a cup of softened butter. Grammy used shortening, back in the day. But, I switched to unsalted butter years ago. Also one cup of sugar, one quarter cup. Dark molasses. One egg. Two cups of flour. Two teaspoons baking soda. One teaspoon cinnamon. One teaspoon ginger. And one teaspoon cloves. First, you should mix your dry ingredients and set them aside. And that is the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Then, combine softened butter and sugar in the mixer and cream for about 2 minutes. Then, add molasses and egg. Scrape down and beat, until combined. At this point, add dry ingredients and mix until a uniform color. Rosa balls the size of a walnut, as grandma would say. Roll in sugar and then squish with the bottom of a glass. Bake 10 to 12 minutes. And this makes about three-and-a-half dozen. So delicious! Eggnog recipe! OK, so I did a little searching about eggnog, and it seems that although similar to posit a drink from the 13th century nog as we know it is an American thing. It may have been a derivative from egg grog, a hot egg and ale mixture, served in a grog mug. I'm dubious about that mix but I do have a lovely classic eggnog recipe from the Farmer's Almanac, for you. While doing my research, I found a super delicious sounding version. So I thought we'd do both. First up, vegan eggnog. You will need, three cups unsweetened almond milk. One control macadamia nuts. One teaspoon, freshly grated nutmeg. One-half teaspoon ground cinnamon. One teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. One-quarter of a cup of sugar to one ounce shots, rum to one ounce shots, brandy and some cinnamon sticks. First, place the almond milk and macadamia nuts in the blender and blend on high, until very creamy. Then add the nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, and sweetenern and blend well. Pulse in the rum and brandy and divide among four glasses. Sprinkle, with freshly grated nutmeg and garnish with cinnamon sticks. For a nonalcoholic version, simply replace the alcohol with additional vanilla extract, to taste, one additional tablespoon at a time, or use a non alcoholic rum flavoring. Use this basic recipe to experiment with different flavors of eggnog. It's easy to add a little flavor to extract or flavored brandy or other alcohol, such as snacks to add favorite holiday flavors, such as gingerbread or peppermint or chocolate or canned pumpkin. Do it your way. Classic eggnog. You will need 12 large eggs separated by one cup, plus two tablespoons of sugar, one half teaspoon of salt. Three cups, heavy cream. One tablespoon vanilla. Seven cups, Whole milk. Two cups, Rum. One cup, Brandy. Freshly grate nutmeg and cinnamon sticks in medium bowl, beet egg whites until they start to thicken. Add one cup of sugar and, then, beat until thick. In a second bowl, beat the egg yolks and salt until sick in a third large bowl. Beat cream until it starts to thicken. Add sugar and vanilla. Then add milk, rum and brandy, beating, continuously, combine beaten egg whites and yolks and beat until mixed and thick. Mix all ingredients and chill. Serve and sprinkle freshly grated nutmeg on top of each glass as a festive garnish. If you're nervous about using raw eggs, there are many recipes that also use a cooking process. We like this one! I want to tell you about my friend Mike and his Electromagnetic Pinball Museum and Restoration Arcade. It's an all inclusive place to relax and share anything related to modern pinball,EM pinball, and arcade games. A group of pinball and arcade fans with an addiction to games of all kinds and Lego, too.$10 gets you free play on pinball and arcade games all day. You can find them at 881 Main Street, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Or online at www. Eletromagneticpinballmuseum.com. Welcome to the finale of our reading of "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickens. So, cuddle up with some snaps and a drink of your choice! Here we go! They were in another scene in place a room not very large or handsome but full of comfort, near to the winter fire, set a beautiful young girl, so like that last, that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her now a comely matron sitting opposite her door. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind to count. And, unlike the celebrated heard in the poem, they were not for children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like 40. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief, but no one seemed to care on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily and enjoyed it very much, and the latter soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands, most ruthlessly."What I would not have given to be one of them, though, I would never have been so rude. No, I wouldn't. For all the wealth in the world have crushed that braided hair and turned it down, and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off. God bless my soul to save my life. Now, as to measuring her waist in sport as they did bold young bruv, I couldn't have done it. I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked to have touched her lips to question to her, to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes and never raised it. To have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price. In short, I would have liked, I do confess, to have the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value. But, now, a knocking at the door was heard in such a rush immediately ensued that she, with laughing face and plunder dress was born towards it at the center of a flushed and boisterous group just in time to greet the father who came home attended by a man, laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then, the shouting and the struggling and the onslaught that was made to the defenseless border, the scaling and with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, to spoil them with brown paper parcels, pulled on tight to his cravat, hung around his neck, pummel his back and kick his legs and irrepressible affection, the shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received, and the terrible announcement that the baby had taken in the act of putting a doll's frying pan into its mouth and was once more suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey glued on a wooden platter. And, the immense relief in finding this was a false alarm. The joy and gratitude and ecstasy, it is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the popular and by one step at a time, up to the top of the house where they went to bed and so subsided and, now, Scrooge looked on, more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside. He turned upon the ghost and seeing that it looked upon him with a face in which some strange way there were fragments of all the faces that had shown him wrestled with it."Leave me be, take me back, haunt me no longer in the struggle." If it can be called a struggle in which the ghost had no visible resistance on its own part, was undisturbed by any effect of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright and dimly connected, that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguish year gap and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head, the spirit dropped beneath it so that the extinguisher covered its whole form. And, though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force. He could not hide the slight which streamed from underneath it, in an unbroken slide, upon the ground. He was conscious of being exhaust hid and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness and further was being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze in which his hand relaxed had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep stage. Three. The second of the three spirits, awakening in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together. Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was, again, upon the stroke of one he felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to see him through Jacob Marley's intervention of finding that he turned uncomfortably cold, when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new specter would draw back. He put them, every one, aside with his own hands, lying down, established a sharp lookout all around the bed, for he wished to challenge the spirit on the moment of its appearance and did not wish to be taken by surprise and made nervous gentlemen of the free and easy sort, hurting themselves and being acquainted with a move or two and being usually equal to the time of day expressed the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pigeon toss to manslaughter between which are opposite extremes. No doubt, there lie a tolerably large and comprehensive range of subjects, without venturing, for Scrooge quite as heartily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a broad field of strange appearances, and, then nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much now being prepared for almost anything. He was not by any means prepared for nothing. And consequently, when the bell struck one in no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent bit of trembling. 5 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. A quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time he lay upon his bed to the very core and center of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour, by which being the only light was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant or would be at and I was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment, an interesting case of spontaneous combustion without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think, as you or I would have thought at first, for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to be done about it and would unquestionably would have done it too. At last I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, which hence on further tracing it, it seemed to shine this idea taking full possession of his mind. He got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door, the moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock. A strange voice called him by name and made him enter. He obeyed Scrooge. It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green that it looked like a perfect grove from each part of which bright, gleaming berries glistened the crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe and ivy reflected back in the light, as if so many mirrors had been scattered there and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney. Has that dull picture ification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time or Marley's or from many and many a winter season gone heaped up on the floor to form a kind of throne where turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat suckling pig long leaders of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red hot chestnuts, cherry cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense wealth cakes, seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam, easy state upon his couch there sat a jolly giant glorious to see who bore a glowing torch in shape not unlike plenty horn and held it up high up to shed its light on Scrooge as he came peeping round the door. Oh, come in, exclaim the ghost. Come in and know me better, man. Scrooge entered timidly and hung his head before the spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been, and though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them. I am the ghost of Christmas present, said the spirit look upon me. Scrooge reverently did, so it was clothed in one simple green robe or mantle boarded with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure that its capricious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of its garment, were also bare and on its head. It wore no other covering than a holly wreath set here, and there was shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free, free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unrestrained demeanor, and its joyful air girded round its middle was an antique scabbard, but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust. You have never seen the likes of me before, exclaimed the Spirit. Never. Scrooge made answer to it. I have never walked forth with the younger members of my family, meaning, for I am very young. My elder brothers, born in these later years, pursued the Phantom. I don't think I have said Scrooge. I am afraid I have not. Have you many brothers, Spirit? More than 1800 said the ghost. A tremendous family to provide for, muttered Scrooge, the ghost of Christmas present. Rose Spirit, said Scrooge. Submissively conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learned a lesson which is working now. Tonight, if you have ought to teach me, let me profit by it. Touch my robe. Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast. Holly Mistletoe, red berries, ivy turkeys, geese, game poultry brawn. Meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit and punch all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night and they stood in the streets some on Christmas morning, where for the weather was severe. The people made a rough but risk and not unpleasant kind of music and scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings and from the tops of their houses whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down onto the road below and splitting into artificial little snowstorms. The house fronts looked black enough and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheets of snow upon the roofs with the dirtier snow upon the ground, which last deposit had been plowed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons, furrows which crossed and re crossed each other. Hundreds of times where the great streets branched off and made intricate channels hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half solid, half frozen, where heavy particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms was if all the chimneys in Great Britain had by one consent, caught fire and were blazing away to their dear heart's content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet there was an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain for the people who were shoveling away on the house tops for jovial and full of glee, calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a snowball better natured missile by far than many are worthy, just laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong. The politics shops were still half open and the fruit year shops were radiant in their glory. There were great round pot bellied baskets of chestnuts shaped like the whiskey coats of jolly old gentleman lolling at the doors and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. Your ruddy brown faced broad girth, Spanish onions shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars and winking from the shelves and wanton slyness. As the girls went by and glanced demurely at the hung up mistletoe. There were pears and apples clustered high and blooming pyramids. There were bunches of grapes made in the shopkeepers benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, the people's mouths, my water gratis. As they passed, there were piles of filbert, mossy and brown, recalling in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods and pleasant shuffling ankle deep through with it leaves. There were nor shall defense squat and swarthy setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and in great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten for dinner. The very gold and silver fish set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl. So members of a dull and stagnant blooded race apparently appeared to know that there was something going on and to a fish when gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement, The grocers the grocers nearly closed with perhaps two shutters down or one. But through those gaps, such glimpses was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made it very sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks or even the blended sense of tea and coffee that were so graceful to the nose, or even that the reasons were so plentiful and rare. The almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest onlookers feel faint and subsequently bilious. What was it that the figs were moist and pulpy? Or that the French plums blushed in their modest tartness from their highly decorated boxes? Or that everything was so good to eat and in its Christmas dress that the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing the wicker baskets wildly and left their purchases on the counter and came running back to fetch them. And committed hundreds of alike mistakes. In the best humor possible, while the grocer and his people were so frank and fresh, the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own worn outside for general inspection. The Christmas doors to pack out if they choose. But soon the steeples called good people on to church and chapel and away they came flocking to the streets in their best clothes and with their gayest faces. At the same time now emerged from scores by streets, lanes and nameless turnings marble people carrying their dinners to the baker's shops. The sight of these poor revelers appeared to interest the spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him in the baker's doorway. And taking off the covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. It was a very uncommon kind of torch for once of twice, when there were angry words between some dinner carriers who had jostled each other, shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good humor was restored directly. But they said it's a shame to quarrel on Christmas Day. And so it was God love it. So it was in time. The bells ceased and the bakers were shut up. And yet there was a genuine shadowing force of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking in the thawed blotch of wet above each bakers oven where the pavements smoked as if its stones were cooking too. Is there a special flavor in that, what you sprinkle from your torch as Scrooge as there is? My own Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day as Scrooge to any kindly given to a poor one? Most lie to a poor one, most as Scrooge because it needs it most. Spirit said Scrooge after a moment's thought. I wonder you, of all means, in the many worlds around us, should desire cramped these people's opportunity of innocent enjoyment. I cried the spirit. You would deprive some of the means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all, said Scrooge. Wouldn't you? I cried the spirit. You seek to close these places on the seventh day, said Scrooge. And that comes to the same thing I seek. Exclaimed The Spirit, Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least that of your family, said Scrooge. There are some upon this earth of yours returned to the Spirit who lay claim to know us and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us in all our kith and kin as if they had never lived. Remember that. And charge their doings on themselves, not us. Scrooge promised that he would, and they went on invisible as they had been before. Into the suburbs of the town. It was a remarkable quality of the ghost which Scrooge had observed at the baker's that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease, and that he stood beneath a low rose quite as gracefully and like a supernatural creature as it was possible he could have done in any lofty hall. And perhaps it was the pleasure the good spirit had in showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind generous, hearty nature and his sympathy with all poor men that led him straight to Scrooge as clerks for their. He went and took Scrooge with him holding on to his robe, and at the threshold of the door, the spirits smiled and stopped to bless Bob Cratchit, dwelling with a sprinkling of his torch. Think of that. Bob had but 15 bob, a week himself. He pocketed on Saturdays, but 15 copies of his Christian name. And yet the Ghost of Christmas present blessed his forum house Thank you so much for joining us here today at the P.G.. We wish peace and health to you all in the upcoming year. If you would like to reach out with a question, comment or. Yes, please, a ghost story. Our email is Jess@Pawtuxetgeneral.com. Please join us next week at the Pawtuxet General. A Something for Posterity production. pre recorded in Pawtuxet.