Ah, memories. Eating a cookie outdoors on the back porch. Was the weather ever really that warm? I ask while admiring the gray slush of the first day of March. See the summer afternoon sun glowing on the plate ... consider me, back when I was "Chicago Baking Examiner" for Examiner.com (do they still exist?).



Golly, it looks like they do. But is there still a baking examiner for the city? One fears not.

Anyway this unusual and very easy pecan pie bar recipe comes from Thoughts for Buffets, the same interesting old 1950s-era cookbook that is the source for Brisket Arcadia and Ozark pudding. Glancing over it I think you'll be struck by a number of things. We are required first of all to gather together only five ingredients, no salt or leavening among them. Then we must "butter a large jelly-roll pan very heavily." How heavily? One of our mere five ingredients is a quarter pound of butter. That's a stick. Nothing specifically says "use that." You'll figure it out.

Have ready:

4 eggs
1 pound of brown sugar
1 and 1/4 cups flour
1/4 pound softened butter
1 cup pecan nuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Beat together until light and caramel colored the eggs, brown sugar, and flour. Use the softened butter to coat the jelly roll pan thickly (you may also use a 13 x 9 inch glass baking dish). Lay the chopped pecans over the butter and gently shake and tap the pan to scatter them. Spread the egg mixture over the nuts. Bake for 20 minutes.

While the cake is warm, you may frost it with a combination of 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/2 teaspoon softened butter, and 2 teaspoons lemon juice beaten into an icing; or you can leave it plain. Cut it into strips when it is cool. You will find the finished bars to be a slightly crunchy but rich cake layer atop a typically gooey and delicious pecan pie filling.

And, rather than reach for a glass of milk or cup of coffee with these, try them -- especially if you leave them unfrosted -- with a little glass of wine. An inexpensive but fruity and robust shiraz would be very nice, don't you think, or a crisp, sweet, and mouth-watering riesling?

You cannot be serious.


No. Really. What about The Glare do you not get?
]

You realize you could just go away.


Gawd.

The barbera is a little-known grape, native to Italy's Piedmont -- hence Mazzoni's label below, cleverly announcing "Piemonte barbera" -- but few wines are fresher, juicier, or more fruity. Zippy and lively, a barbera is the perfect pizza wine. Do indulge.


Retail, about $15.

Let us sum up, dear things, and create a sort of timeline too: as far back as the 1940s, a family of winemakers in Tuscany (home of Chianti) begin to produce Sassicaia, meaning "place of stones." This is a red wine named for its unpromising vineyard and made, against all Chianti's rules, from French cabernet sauvignon instead of the approved Italian sangiovese. With time these unusual Sassicaias earn appreciation as "interesting and powerful."

Comes the year 1971. The winemakers' cousin, Piero Antinori, takes notice and makes a rule-breaking wine of his own. It is all sangiovese, but aged French-style in oak barrels, as Chiantis are not. He calls it Tignanello. It is "the first well known non-Chianti Chianti; the press nicknamed these new Italian wines 'super Tuscans' " (Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible).

1985. Piero Antinori's younger brother Ludovico takes notice and makes a wine of his own, next door to the vineyards of Sassicaia. He combines cabernet and merlot, the classic blend of French Bordeaux. He calls it Ornellaia, "place of ash trees," again for its unpromising site (think summer heat, rocks, and swamps, besides the ash trees).

The rest is all glory, and four star reviews, and vintage dates in wine guides highlighted in red. Not to mention more prestige than you can shake a stick at. "Wealthy bandwagonists," Hugh Johnson calls the Sassicaia/Ornellaia crowd, though he gives the big O. four stars and red ink, too. Especially, as it happens, the 1998 vintage.


An old cedar box
bright puckery acidity
sound strong tannin
thick, satiny, meaty taste
black pepper and tomato

one thinks: "this is Italian"

Yes, one may think all one likes, but in coping with a bottle of wine that sells at retail for about $200 or $300, a bottle from one of the (now) most prestigious DOCs in Italy -- Bolgheri, of the once unpromising stones and ash trees -- in coping with a bottle produced by the twenty-sixth generation of a legendary Italian wine making family, well. Anyone with a few decades' experience in wine is going to respond to a sample of this with more than my haiku of five lines. People with great experience, James Suckling for example who named this 1998 Ornellaia Wine Spectator's Wine of the Year in 2001, are going to mention currants and blackberries and tapenade [an olive-and-caper paste used in Provençal cooking, and a good descriptor to remember the next time I want to say a wine seems "briny," or olive-like]. They are going to mention dried herbs, velvet, "fine minerality," and "incredible concentration." Hugh Johnson in his Pocket Wine Guide will simply say, after the bit about bandwagonists, "vy. good."

Can people with great experience therefore appreciate it more than we do? Perhaps.

Retail? Specifically? You had to ask. The 1998 vintage sells (at auction) for between $150 and $275 a bottle; the 2008 vintage retails at about $300.

To carry on the timeline -- July, 2008: go here for Steven Spurrier's Decanter interview with the Antinoro brothers, Ludovico and Piero,

Don't worry. When I go off the [food and wine] reservation, you at least get a cocktail at the end.

Both "semi-navigable megalopolis" and "liberal hell-hole" are quotes from anonymous commenters on web-based articles about Chicago, articles more or less long lost in the ethernet. One commenter, years ago, explained that he had moved to some other, smaller city, because he could no longer stand coping with the semi-navigability; the other, not nearly so resourceful in his language, entertained a different set of grudges against the city -- taxes and violence topped the list -- and simply dismissed it all based on what political party he thought maintained the problems.

Perhaps hell-hole is a bit unfair. Michigan Avenue in daylight is very nice. Semi-navigable, I get. But both problems do add up, and one is struck by the occasional pithy wisdom of anonymous commenters. Not all are trolls.

To add up, for instance: if one knows that Music of the Baroque is presenting a concert of Handel's Water Music next week, at the Harris Theater which sits conveniently near the train station on Michigan Avenue, one is encouraged to hope (as Mr. Wise of the Mapp and Lucia books would say). Handel! The Baroque! Our theme for the year, along with lemons! Only an hour and a half commute, one way!

But no. The performance starts at 7:30 pm. They all start at 7:30 pm. Music of the Baroque further warns newbies that performances usually last about two hours. What a pity. No woman in her right mind is going to dodder about, even at the daylight-nice intersection of Michigan and Randolph, at 9:30 on a February night, and then go and wait for the train. Et cetera. Who on earth attends these concerts, and don't they rather worry? I hope at least the audience don't spend their entire time glancing furtively at watches and mentally rehearsing routes back. Through the liberal hel -- .

Anyway I had a blissful experience recently. My friend laughed in mock pity at the lack of adventurousness -- "you just stay inside and listen to the radio, dear" -- but it was delightful to keep safely under the covers at 9:30 on a weeknight, and hear La Bohème sung live from Lyric Opera (blocks and blocks away from the train station), and to think no matter how much they are enjoying themselves, all those people in all those plush seats must still struggle with the trip home. While I am home. And am hearing everything just as well as they are.

Or almost. Yes, yes, live shows are incomparable. But searching among my small collection of music CDs, I find I still own a disk of the Water Music done by Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert in 1983. Why can't I just listen to that? Trevor Pinnock is still alive too, so there's an added fillip. I'm only surprised and pleased because, the disk having been produced in the year I graduated high school, and this single disk specifically having been left behind by my ex-husband upon his decamping for true love and parts west, I naturally would have associated it utterly with a dead past had I not learned differently. (I think we used to play the music as newlyweds hosting dinner parties, to give the apartment tone.) Mr. P. even has a website. He is a CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire too, exactly as Mrs. Wise was. Imagine that.

So here is what I want you to do. I want you to admire this lovely bouquet of flowers,





and then navigate your way to YouTube, where you may listen to a bit of Handel whenever you like.

And I want you to have a cocktail. We'll pick one in keeping with our lemon theme for the year. What better than to try a "gin-and-French," again from Mapp and Lucia? I don't recall this drink mentioned in any of the novels -- we hear more of absinthe, vermouth, and Major Benjy's plain whisky-and-sodas -- but in the paradisial television films made from the books, Georgie (Nigel Hawthorne) requests one, so we will graciously assume the scriptwriter did some 1920s-era homework and accept its authenticity on that score. Besides, any time one finds a fellow blogger who actually also likes food, wine, retro things, and cocktails from Mapp and Lucia, one takes advantage. The Past on a Plate says that a gin and French is --

the juice of half a lemon (or about half a jigger of lemon juice)
a jigger of gin
a jigger of dry (French) vermouth
5 ounces tonic water

-- all stirred over ice in a tall glass. She notes that other sources simply call the thing a martini, which it would be, -- at least those versions that replace the lemon juice with a mere twist of lemon peel and further omit the tonic. Talking of authenticity and authority, BBC Food says a gin and French is equal parts gin and Lillet stirred over ice. Lillet, in turn, is a French brand-name aperitif wine, made from white or red Bordeaux mixed with citrus liqueurs plus a little quinine, and aged in oak barrels before bottling. The presence of quinine hints -- apparently -- at Lillet's original name, Kina Lillet. We say apparently because the waters so to speak are muddy here. If you absolutely wish to delve into the history of Lillet, its formulations and names, and which one is correct in a James Bond-ish "Vesper" martini, you could hardly do better than to consult Savoy Stomp's article "Kina Lillet 2012." They drag in Kingsley Amis ....

However you choose to experiment with Georgie's treat, be aware that it is going to be potent. Equal parts gin and vermouth make for a bigger little drink-y than our master Charles Schumann, for one, would likely allow. Even Lillet is 17% alcohol. Qui-hi.

Do we dare break it out, for an ordinary Saturday night with oh, I don't know, chips and dip and a viewing of A Summer Place on Netflix? Or maybe The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? Something retro like that. Last weekend, you see, was not terribly restful. This one deserves to be.


More on Champagne Henriot; retail, about $40.

Maybe you'd better fry your own chips and make your own dip, so as to feel gourmet, and worthy. Or source yourself some perfect fresh oysters, and see what all that fuss is about.

"Marvelous pigs in satin" comes from the movie James and the Giant Peach, which you may have seen a thousand times, too, if like me you had young children watching Disney films in the '90s and '00s. At a crucial point, one of the characters assures another that "marvelous things will happen!" but he says it in a thunderstorm or something, so his words are half-lost. The other characters think he has inexplicably yelled "mar-vel-ous pi-igs in satin!" In my house "marvelous pigs in satin" has now become a shorthand way of saying don't worry, things might change, everything will be fine, this could be the best thing that ever happened, try it you might like it, etc.

The phrase came to mind over the weekend when one child was stuck on the expressway in the snow, heading home with all the other commuters at five miles per hour, having failed to pick up her karate sparring equipment for the big tournament on Sunday. At that time the other child was cooking dinner -- we'll learn more about it when we discuss "dinner in half an hour, really" -- while the other other child showered after a workout but before settling down to do more math homework. Don't worry, I said to the child in the snow, and the one at the stove, and the one grappling with factoring polynomials (I ask you. No, seriously. I do ask you). Marvelous pigs in satin! Dinner will be delightful, sensei (karate instructor) may be able to loan some sparring equipment, with study you may do all right factoring polynomials.

Or, we may all end up sitting squashed in the back seat of a police car in Rolling Meadows in the rain on Sunday afternoon, clutching karate trophies while the tow truck pulls away and the nice officer fills out an accident report. The day's weather could not possibly have been more dreary, and this on the anniversary of Queen Victoria's wedding too! Absurd. Marvelous things don't always happen.

Anyway, more random stories: remember how nice it is to own a clock radio again, and fall asleep to the classical sounds of WFMT? The trouble with this new habit is that one never knows what WFMT will play next. Gentle tinny harpsichords, or a bit of Saint-Saëns, are all very well and soothing at ten o'clock at night. But so often the announcer's voice seems to come on so loud, as he informs you that "THAT WAS CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS' 'AQUARIUM,' FROM THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS." Or, one may be listening to a most interesting and complex and intense piano piece, backed by a great deal of static and fuzziness, as though the recording came interestingly from a very old vinyl album ... a blank space. One must have fallen asleep. Suddenly a poor but brave male voice shout-sings the solo "Miracle of Miracles" from Fiddler on the Roof.

This really did happen a few nights ago. It was ghastly. My startled brain reached back from oblivion to grab some sort of anchor or memory to cope with this. (Probably a reptilian survival mechanism. Bite!) What should surface but a recollection of my freshman-year high school science teacher onstage, as Motel the tailor, singing this song and creditably too in a faculty-student production of the play. I can still see, not only him in full cry, but also the look of the program typed out on brown paper on a real typewriter, before the days of computers and default Word text-wrap. His name was Stan Something-or-other-incredibly-long-and-Polish. Since he was the only male teacher in an all-girls school, of course we were all mad about him. As we were not a little in awe of the senior girls playing alongside him.

The radio station followed up this professional rendition of "Miracles" with a late-night interview with the professional himself. Not our Stan, but Austin Pendleton, they called him. Is it true, as I read somewhere, that every single experience we ever have and everything we ever see is permanently recorded in the brain, but that we forget the bulk of them, so that we can function unburdened by it all? Even memories of the casts of screwball comedies? I ask because, in my sleepy half-oblivion and having already revisited my high school's Spring Musical circa 1980, even the name Austin Pendleton slotted into place. This actor played, did he not, the role of the rich, wonderfully nerdy scientist-benefactor handing out fellowships to Ryan O'Neal in What's Up Doc?

Why yes, he did. I looked him up when fully alert the next day. Not only that. Austin Pendleton has evidently had a long and successful career, not the least of his achievements being that he originated, originated I say, the role of Motel the tailor in the very first Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway in 1964. So what do I know? Perhaps he sang very nicely after all.

But after all I mustn't forget, this is a food and wine blog. During lulls in the competition at the karate tournament, I read Karen Hess' Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery (Columbia University Press, 1981, 1995). Karen Hess' scholarship is wondrous to behold. Imagine knowing about "the Runic thorn,"* imagine having access to real, rare manuscripts, at the Bodleian, at the New York Botanical Garden Library (didn't know there was one). But I must ask. Why is her tone so angry and joyless? She reminds me of M.F. K. Fisher, except that Karen Hess is a starchy, displeased (cooking-)school mistress where Fisher is more an offended dove/wordsmith-artiste. Both hate the modern world's defilement of all traditional food sources and ancient cooking techniques. Both especially hate having to share the world with other human beings who have rushed the pace of degradation by thankfully embracing atrocities like pasteurized cream, metal stoves with piped-in gas, and refrigeration. Everything was better, you see, when ovens were brick, oysters were pickled the Tudor way, and there was no atomic fallout in Our Lakes and Streams. "All salt and freshwater creatures must have had a fine clean taste that none of us has ever tasted, nor ever shall," Mrs. Hess pronounces. Oh really. No mention of cholera in olden-time drinking water, for a start. She even hates flour, at least in sauces. So incidentally does America's Test Kitchen's own Chris Kimball, who in Fannie's Last Supper (2010) wrote an entire book about Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook, in which he in fact did not recreate a meal Fannie would have recognized, partly because he didn't like her "floury" sauces.

We won't dwell. I only wonder whether, among the great foodies, these attitudes are sometimes stunts and business decisions. As to Mrs. Hess -- unless it was a stunt -- let us pray God that in heaven they at least keep her away from Julia Child, whom in life she called a "dithering idiot."

We won't dwell; we'll return to earth and to our own kitchens. What follows is not exactly a recipe for a marvelous pig in satin, but something like: it's a bit of pork with apples and cream, adapted and simplified from a dish in René Verdon's White House Chef Cookbook (1967) -- on weekends you see, among our random stories, we also tend to cook from books randomly pulled off the pantry shelf. M. Verdon dedicated this one to the late President and his family, in gratitude for their giving him "the happiest years of his life." Mere happiness, and a modern recipe done with pasteurized cream. I fear the better sort among us would be appalled.




"Roast Loin of Pork St. Cloud"

4 pound pork loin roast (or pork shoulder)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 stalk celery, diced
2 Tbsp butter
1 cup white wine
1 cup applesauce
1 large apple, sliced thin
brown sugar (about 1-2 Tbsp)
1/2 cup heavy cream

Melt the butter in a heavy pot, and brown the pork on all sides. Scatter the garlic and celery atop the meat. Pour on the wine. Cover the pot and place it in a preheated 300 F oven, to bake slowly for 3 to 4 hours. (Turn the heat down to 225 F after the first hour.)

About half an hour before serving, take the pot out of the oven and add to the liquid in the pan the applesauce and the sliced apples, which you will tuck around the meat. Sprinkle a little brown sugar over the apples. Return all to the oven and cook until the apples are tender. Pour in the cream, stir it up and simmer it for five more minutes.



*The Runic thorn shows up as the letter y, pronounced "th" in old English words like ye -- which is not an archaic "you" but instead is read "the," as yn reads "then."

Isn't it gorgeous? The name means "beautiful joy," but la joie is feminine, so why is the wine not called Belle Joie? Never mind, we won't quibble.

Retail, about $90. Don't quibble -- just take a breath, you'll feel better in a minute.

And no, I haven't tried it yet. Note that it will taste absolutely bone dry. Beau Joie's website explains that the wine is made with zero "dosage," no "liqueur d'expédition." In other words, no extra shot of reserve wine and/or sugar is added to the finished champagne before final corking.




I'm saving it for a special occasion. Maybe Valentine's Day, to be savored with pan-seared salmon, and couscous, and some sort of vegetable dressed with butter and Moroccan preserved lemons? Yes, why ever not?

To braise is to sear a piece of meat beautifully brown on all sides over high heat, quickly, and then to deglaze the pan with some nice liquid (wine, or broth), add an aromatic or two, and pop it all into the oven to finish cooking for an hour. In this case the meat was pork chops, the aromatics a clove of garlic and a dash of merquen. Merquen are smoked chilis, dried, flaked and stored in a cute jar with a cork stopper. They were brought to us some time ago courtesy of the nice people who manage the Wines of Chile live blogger tasting twice a year. The "tasting kit" for the very first virtual tasting I was invited to attend included a bottle of merquen along with a stack of recipes, and all those delicious, brawny Chilean carmeneres.

Of course I drank the wines long ago, but I continue to use and enjoy the bottle of merquen. If you happen to have some too, use it sparingly until you decide how much you like the heat. A quarter teaspoon, to begin, will do. You will want your oven temperature, to finish the braising, to be about 325 F.



While the meat cooks in the oven, you might make some mashed potatoes and a salad perhaps, and pour the wine. It's February 6th ... you know what that means for us history geeks. Almost time to celebrate the wedding day of Queen Victoria! That will fall on February 10th. It has nothing to do with either pork chops or merquen. But thank goodness we history geeks live such rich inner lives.

Remember our Guenoc Victorian claret? This is made by the same people. (But, are they the same people who make Guenoc, with a fancy scrolled 'G'? Or have the original Guenocians changed their label?) Quite as good as the claret, if a bit brawnier. Retail, about$12.

Exactly what you want from a California chardonnay, smooth buttery apples and a zing of acidity for refreshment. I don't think my readership is so immense that I risk starting some sort of freebie avalanche on the good people at Dry Creek when I say, -- they are so proud of this fine wine that on their website they actually invite you to "ask for a sample bottle." Perhaps they mean, "if you happen to be in California at our tasting rooms right this minute."



Otherwise, retail, about $20.

Are the cookies ordinary? Yes. Are they unimproved, un-"re-thought," in the manner of gourmet cookbooks and magazines whose editors are (understandably) forever hunting for the new and delightful, and who would probably "jazz up" this old favorite somehow with African birdseye chilis, or something artisanal and foamed? Why -- yes. But they are also, shall we say, "dreamy." After you make them, I'll give you a retro, kiddie book to read. What better comfort on a blustery, snowy, dark January day?


When you make these cookies, use a natural peanut butter (the kind that has to be stirred when you open the jar, because the oils have risen to the top), and do sift the flour -- it makes a difference in texture and is more economical. (You end up using less flour.)

This recipe can be found in any standard American cookbook, but my version happens to come from a junior high school home economics class.

Peanut butter cookies

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 and 1/4 to 1 and 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda

Preheat the oven to 375 F.

Cream the butter, and beat in the white sugar until the mixture is fluffy; then beat in the brown sugar. Stir in the peanut butter, egg, and vanilla.

Mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and add them all at once to the first mixture. Stir, and form into small balls (don't make them too big -- a little smaller than a golf ball is good). Press each ball down with a fork dipped in sugar, to make a cross hatch pattern.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes.

**************

Then, speaking of junior high, sit down and enjoy the story of Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar. It goes like this:

Review of Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

It’s impossible to pass up a title like Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar, especially when the first two lines alone make the book worth its 50 cent, castoff price: " ‘Tom, your new atomic sports car is absolutely dreamy!’ said Phyllis Newton. Eighteen-year-old Tom Swift Jr. grinned at the pretty, dark haired girl ...."

Tom Swift is the male counterpart of Nancy Drew, the fantastically accomplished, brave, upright youth, mature enough to be out of school and driving around having adventures, but young enough to still require fully adult mentors, and adult rescuers from danger when adventure turns rough. Like Nancy, he also has a strong, wise, moneyed father, another scientist and inventor whose Swift Enterprises is doing well enough to provide young Tom with a four-square-mile laboratory and production plant, where he creates atomic energy capsules and tests new, super-strength plastics. Early on, there is an atomic explosion in Tom’s lab, but he and his friend Bud clean it up right away, and then they relax over a pot of cocoa.

The storyline is gloriously wild. Someone wants to steal the secret of Tom’s new vehicle, and then his mother and sister are given two fabulous rubies which have something to do both with important advances in maser communications, and with a cursed ruby mine in the struggling young nation of "Kabulistan." Sinister men in turbans spy through windows, and a bomb goes off in an airport. Tom drives cars, pilots planes, and calmly deals with everyone from predatory business executives in "Shopton" to shady antique booksellers in Teheran and mounted Kurdish tribesmen in the highlands of central Asia. When he first shows off his atomicar for the press, he himself takes the controls after a reporter mocks the planned use of a robot-driver. ("Good heavens, boy!" his father bursts out later. "You might have been killed if the repelatron-force ray from your anticrash device hadn’t stopped that truck!") On weekends, Tom relaxes with his family’s business friends, strolling the artists’ colony in Taos, or hiking, swimming, and playing tennis in the Adirondacks. They all eat good meals, fried chicken and biscuits at home, sheep’s head and pomegranates abroad. Because of his previous inventions he has had contact with representatives of advanced civilizations in outer space, but they don’t make an appearance in this book.

To author Appleton’s credit, and apart from the credit he deserves for his research, he does keep his eye on two things throughout the story. He bothers to describe Tom’s experiments, albeit loosely – there’s talk of "hydraulic pressure gear," and valves and megacycles – and he bothers to include real violence, not gratuitously but because Tom gets involved with violent men. Only once does a mute thug aim a carbine at Tom’s friend, but when he does, he means business.

Tom Swift’s adventures must have been great fun for a boy to plunge into, say on a fine, free summer afternoon in 1962. They’re still quite a tour de force now.

It's winter. It's cold. It's dark. What better than to curl up on the couch with a cocktail, or better yet a nice glass of port or cream sherry, and read ghost stories? When I used to maintain a book review blog, I used to read more. Or was it the other way around? Allow me to import something.

***********

What makes a ghost frightening? That it is more alive than we are.

From The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Brad Leithauser (1994), come these two to start a collection. First is Ann Bridge's marvelous "The Buick Saloon," originally published in 1936. An exotic setting -- the foreign Legation in Peking in the 1930s -- a dumpy little diplomatic wife who hears a disembodied female voice speaking French in the back of her chauffeured car (that's the Saloon); there is little more to be said, because to say too much more would be to reveal too much and spoil it all. Suffice it that Ann Bridge (pen name of Lady Mary Dolling Sanders O'Malley, English diplomat's wife) is, if not the find of a lifetime, at least the find of a good long time, for any appreciative reader. Just listen:

Below her Peking lay spread out -- a city turned by the trees which grow in every courtyard into the semblance of a green wood, out of which rose the immense golden roofs of the Forbidden City; beyond it, far away, the faint mauve line of the Western Hills hung on the sky.

And then she turns to overlook the old garden in the house by the Tartar wall, where the French voice had once been happy.



In the same anthology we find "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," by Henry James (1868). Certainly he is a grander writer, one of the evidences of which I think is that unobtrusive, but always present, arch-browed humor which seems the mark of a master. But as a ghost story this one is less effective than Ann Bridge's. If ghosts are frightening because they are more alive than we are, then the ghost of this Romance is neither terribly alive nor terribly frightening.

Here we follow two sisters in colonial Massachusetts as they fight, very quietly, over one well-to-do English suitor. When he picks one of them, the other must make the best of it. Rosalind and Perdita were neither very loving nor very hateful toward one another to begin with, so there is no question of a ruined sisterly love or a further embittered hate. When one of them becomes a ghost, it really is all about the clothes. The creepiest moment of the story occurs when they are both still living and polite. The betrothed sister plumbs the depths of the other's jealousy and quietly says, " 'At least grant me a year. In a year I can have a little boy, or even a little girl ....' "

The ghost story genre is a challenging one. A writer has to get the scope and the pace of the visitation(s) just right, or else the delicate souffle of fear, fantasy, and plausibility collapses. It collapses, I think, even for Ann Bridge in her "The Song in the House," contained in a different anthology -- The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Edward Wagenknecht (1947). It's another beautiful story, but, a whole gardenful of bejeweled Elizabethan ghosts, and all in broad daylight? Alas, no.

Curiously enough, Ann Bridge's papers, thirty boxes of them, are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Someone gave them as a gift in 1975, the year after her death. It seems rather an abrupt document dump. I hope she doesn't haunt the place.

We like malbecs. Think of them as cherry pie in a glass, the best of them homemade cherry pie, the ordinary ones more like those little gooey fried Hostess pies you used to buy at the little local grocery store and eat on streetcorners with your little (gooey?) friends.



Retail, about $15. (It's homemade.)