January 2011

T wo versions of Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery appeared in 1796, and the second one has an addition at the end which is intriguing because we know nothing about who the author is scolding or why this small piece of sabotage was perpetrated. The tacked-on page is printed on a paper different from the sturdy rag paper of the text, and it is labeled “Advertisement,” as shown below:

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the corrections ever caught up with the originals, and the cook who used twice as much emptins or half as much flour as she needed probably never knew why her cake was a miserable failure.

Our friend and frequent contributor John Maass has sent us this mysterious picture, which he found in the Philadelphia City Archives. At first it would seem to be a baseball game between two teams of young women. “But close examination,” writes Maass, “reveals that there is a team of girls and a team of disguised men. The girls wear skimmer hats; the men large bonnets. From here on, everything is speculation, though the elaborate finery and neat padding of the men’s team suggest a carefully planned social event. It is unlikely that more can be known about this sunlit day of about ninety years ago, but perhaps some reader will recognize the setting. ”

A JUNIOR VIEW FROM POTSDAM OF ULTRA, SIGABA, BOMBE, AND OTHER ENIGMAS GOOD EVENING (AGAIN) EVERYBODY A MORAL MINORITY …ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK

We were pleased last year to publish for the first time (June/ July 1980) the private diary Harry S. Truman scribbled for his own information at Potsdam when, as the new President, he attended his first summit conference. His observations about the other world leaders were typically pungent.

While Truman was reacting to his counterparts, a young lieutenant, gleeful to have been assigned to duty at Potsdam, was reacting to Truman. This officer, James M. Vardaman, has sent us some letters he wrote home at the time. Lieutenant Vardaman had an unusual entree; he was the nephew of Truman’s naval aide, and he was introduced to an awesome roster of military and civilian brass. He confided to his mother that “I have to pinch myself every five minutes to see if I am not dreaming.” He noted that Stalin never seemed to change expression although “theoretically [he] smiles just as other humans do…” and he mentions Churchill “strolling out alone with his big cigar.”

“Be secret and exult,” wrote William Butler Yeats in a phrase military men and warring nations would take to heart—as a current exhibit at the National Museum of American Historyin Washington, D. C., demonstrates. The exhibit—which is on display in the museum’s Computer Hall, fittingly enough—features cryptographic machines used during World War I and World War II. Recently declassified, most of the material is on loan from the National Security Agency.

Among the devices in the show is the German Enigma, used during World War II to send out thousands of ULTRA messages that the Nazis considered undecipherable by the Allies. Also on display is a rare photograph of the Bombe, an Allied machine used to break the Enigma’s code, together with one of the intercepted ULTRA messages. Other items include the U.S. M-134C, otherwise known as Sigaba, an electric cipher machine used for strategic exchanges between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; a World War I Navy Cipher Box; and the U.S. Army’s M-94, a disk cipher patterned after a design conceived by Thomas Jefferson.

Cranberry sauce. Johnnycake. Pumpkin pie. Indian pudding. Though all these uniquely American concoctions had been bubbling and browning in American kitchens for 150 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not a single recipe for any of them had ever appeared in print. In fact, there was no truly American recipe in any cookbook until 1796, the year of Washington’s retirement, when Amelia Simmons of Connecticut published American Cookery , the first book of native American recipes written by an American. It was printed at the author’s own expense in Hartford, where she is thought to have lived (virtually nothing is known about her life), and was sold at Isaac Beers’s bookstore, according to an ad in The Connecticut Journal of June 8,1796. In addition to introducing recipes for pumpkin pudding (now called pie), for American cranberries, and for corn-meal dishes, American Cookery also presented the first recipes for soft gingerbread and for pickled watermelon rind, patriotically dubbed “American Citron.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: In October, 1944, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, after having engineered two years of island-hopping fighting in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Guam, decided to take on the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands just 660 miles south of Tokyo. Shaped like a pork chop, the island was just five miles long and two and a half miles wide at its broadest point; at its narrow southern tip lay a dormant volcano, Mount Suribachi; north of Suribachi lay three Japanese airfields, two complete and one under construction—and that was the problem. Iwo lay halfway between Tokyo and American air bases on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian in the Mariana Islands. American bombers making the 1,500-mile run to Tokyo were being seriously harassed by Japanese fighters from Iwo; and crippled bombers returning from Tokyo needed a place to put down.

A pumpkin and a typewriter …

In an excerpt from her forthcoming biographical study, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character —completed shortly before her death this winter…the late historian Fawn Brodie unravels the extraordinary psychological and evidentiary tangle that bound Nixon, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers together in one of the most sensational spy trials in our history—and set Nixon on the road to the Presidency.

An airplane in every garage …

Ever since the Wright brothers successfully defied gravity in 1903, the notion of “the family car of the air” has been a recurring—and often hilarious—dream of aerial entrepreneurs who have devised everything from auto-gyros to “aero-cars” in an attempt to persuade Americans to become sky commuters. Being sensible folk, as author Joseph J. Corn points out in his article, most Americans have resisted the impulse.

An American perspective …

Two centuries ago William Blake said with some prescience, “Energy is spirit, and the spirit is within us. ”

You ask: What can history teach us about energy? It can teach us that inattention to its problems contributed to the fall of civilizations. Plato describes in Critias how Attica had already become ”… a mere relic of the original country … all the rich, soft soil has moulted away, leaving a country of skin and bones.” The Greeks (and the Romans, Carthaginians, and so on) cut down their trees for firewood and made barren much of the Mediterranean littoral. In North Africa (the ancient granary of Rome) the Arab is not only the child of the desert but also in part its father.

How did we get into our present troubles? Bit by bit. Beyond absurdity, this is stuff for the theater of the bizarre. It is not so much a question of villainy as of myopia.