Old-Time Drinks and Journalism, but Women Heroes Steal the Show

There is much to celebrate and honor in both.

Saturday News Digest, V2/E1

Instead of the usual looking forward into the new year, the first monthly edition of the Saturday News Digest of 2023 reflects on a past that has correlations to our present. One article highlights the joys of alcoholic concoctions from the last century or two, nestled within the kind of local newspapers that have all but disappeared. Another celebrates two women who understood the importance of books—one as a cookbook author, the other a bookseller and warrior for the First Amendment.

Table of Contents

• From the Mail Bag

• In Praise of Consequential Women

• A Curry Surprise

From the Mail Bag
Not for dry January.

A reader stumbled upon the following newsclips while researching the always rich history of American drinking habits. This is, perhaps, not the appropriate moment to share drink recipes, considering it’s January and many have taken the pledge to try sobriety for the month. Not me, though, not that I shouldn’t think about it.

These recipes are worth sharing both as historical culinary doozies and as treasuries of the kind of journalism that once wove communities tightly together and that the Internet has pretty much shredded.

The adventurous will find the recipes very doable.

From the April 27, 1919 edition of The Richmond Times, Richmond, VA

Less than a year before the 18th Amendment prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol, the Department of Agriculture weighed in on the legality of Zython, what the article rightly points out to be “the beer of the early Greeks.”

From the June 5, 1885 edition of The Caldwell Tribune, Caldwell, Idaho Territory

The most relevant quote that would not be out of place for this week’s Congressional shenanigans notes that: “Places where there are no punch-bowls are voted slow.” The punch contains good measures of wine, rum, and whiskey.

From the January 12, 1916 edition of The Hartford Herald, Hartford, Kentucky 

It’s rare that a recipe plays a deciding role in a court proceeding, but the surrounding articles are equally of great interest.

In Praise of Consequential Women
Noting the December passing of two women who understood and protected the power of books. 

Journalist and food writer Cara De Silva was the editor of In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy from the Women of Terezín. Published in 1996, the book brought to light recipes collected by women held in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín in Czechoslovakia. The importance of the book stretches from the powerful circumstances in which it was written by the women to the exalted role food always plays in sustaining the human spirit. In the following clip, De Silva talks about the surprising reception the book received upon its publication.

Joyce Meskis founded The Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. She was a 34-year-old single mother of two young girls when she bought the small neighborhood bookstore and had no experience running a business, let alone a bookstore. Over the next several decades, she grew it into one of the largest bookstores in the country, with several branches in Denver that collectively offered 400,000 titles on its shelves. The Tattered Cover changed the whole experience of visiting a bookstore. Meskis was the first to make going to a bookstore a favorite destination by furnishing customers with comfortable couches and armchairs where they could spend as much time as they wanted reading or talking.

But Meskis’ influence flowed beyond her store. She stood on the front lines of the fight for the First Amendment that began to run hot in the 1980s, facing down law authorities seeking the private buying records of a customer and legislators who wanted to curtail the public’s right to buy books that others deemed offensive.

It is my view that as booksellers we have our own version of the Hippocratic oath to maintain the health and well being of the First Amendment….That, in fact, it is our most honorable charge to provide books of all kinds, even those with which we may personally disagree, find distasteful, even abhor.—Joyce Meskis

If you can’t tell by this time, I am personally indebted to Meskis, who gave a fledgling food writer the opportunity to read an essay from her first book, Pie Every Day. She went a step further and, instead of following the usual practice of returning the unsold books the publisher had sent for the reading, bought them all and had me sign each copy for future customers of The Tattered Cover.

A Curry Surprise
COVID brain leads to an interesting discovery.

The other morning I stumbled into the kitchen, slightly feverish, completely befuddled. My husband made oatmeal and kept a bowl warm for me. It was just the thing for an invalid with a distressed stomach and an arrow-piercing headache. I heated up the bowl in the microwave, then shuffled over to the spice shelf and took down cinnamon, sprinkling a good amount over the top in the hope I could taste something, and then shuffled over to the couch. I was rewarded at the first small taste, which revealed that the jar of cinnamon was an old one that I had reused to store curry bought loose at the local Middle Eastern store. You know what, though? It wasn’t bad at all, offering a little kick and oomph to the bland mush. Bonus points went to how it warmed my mangled stomach.

I highly recommend it!