A Very Special (Very Late) Independence Day Entry

Dish: To Make Pepper Cakes That Will Keep Good in Ye House for a Quarter or Halfe A Year

Country of Origin: America! USA! USA! U! S! A! ... but in a more technical sense Britain.

Year: late 1600s

Source: Martha Washington's cookbook, via Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats by Karen Hess.

Woooo!  America!  Am I right, folks?  What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by taking a lesson from the first First Lady herself, Martha Washington.  Her family cookbook has been reprinted as Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, with helpful annotations by Karen Hess.

I was hunting through it for a good Independence Day dish.  I considered for a moment "A Made Dish," but this turned out to be essentially french toast, and while this might be a day for FREEDOM TOAST, if I made french toast it might just surrender to some Nazi toast and then it'd be up to Ol' Uncle Sam to swoop in and rescue its ass.  Amiright?  USA! USA! USA!

Instead I decided to make pepper cakes because I haven't yet tried making a baked good for this blog, and there was also the intriguing claim that they would last me a "quarter to halfe a year." And that's just good American workmanship.  Here is the recipe:

Take treacle 4 pound, fine wheat flowre halfe a peck, beat ginger 2 ounces, coriander seeds 2 ounces, caraway & annyseeds of each an ounce, suckets slyced in small pieces a pretty quantity, powder of orring pills one ounce. Worke all these into paste, and let it ly 2 or 3 hours. After, make it up into what fashions you please in pretty large cakes about an intch and halfe thick at moste, or rather an intch will be thick enough. Wash your cakes over with a little oyle and treacle mixt together befor you set them into ye oven, then set them in after household bread. & though they be hard baked, they will give againe, when you have occasion to use it, slice it and serve it up.

Rock.  Flag.  Eagle.

SUBSTITUTIONS AND NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

1) Treacle: is molasses.

2) Caraway Seeds: I couldn't find these, but I know them to have a flavor very similar to anise seed, so I just doubled the amount of anise.

3) Suckets: Suckets are candied citrus peels, popular in Elizabethan England, and beyond. Since not many stores sell suckets these days (despite their obvious marketing potential as Suck-itz) I had to make my own.  More about this in the "cooking" section.

4) Powder of Orring Pill: Orange peel powder seems to me another ingredient that has fallen out of popularity.  I figured I would try to recreate this taste by making my suckets out of orange peel.

COOKING

This recipe was sort of a two-in-one, because I had to make suckets before I could make the pepper cakes.  I found an old recipe online, but also a nearly identical modern recipe for candied orange peel.  Since the biggest difference between the two was that the modern recipe listed precise quantities, I figured I would follow that.  It was a simple process: 

(1) Boil the peels three times to reduce bitterness, 

(2) Boil them in sugar and water for about an hour

 (3) Roll them in powdered sugar.  

Unsurprisingly, the suckets by themselves taste sweet and orangey, with a little bit of bitterness.  By themselves I thought they tasted pretty okay (and I've kept the extras to snack on when I have a bit of a sweet tooth).

With my suckets done, I was ready to make the cakes themselves.  The process seemed pretty easy; all I really had to do was mix the ingredients together.  My biggest change in the recipe was to reduce the obscene quantities listed here.  One peck of flour is about 16 cups. That's going to make a lot of cakes.  I reduced all the quantites to 1/8 of the listed amount, yielding what seemed to me pretty workable proportions:

2/3 c. molasses

2 c. whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 T. ginger

3/4 T. coriander

3/4 T. anise seed

~ 6 T. suckets

These cakes are essentially spiced gingerbread, but with some interesting omissions.  There's no liquid aside from the molasses itself, no leavening agent, and no eggs.  Considering all this, it's not surprising that mixing these ingredients together made a thiiiiiick, thick paste.  It resisted stirring, and when I let it sit, it clung stubbornly to one side of the bowl.

Yum?

You may notice these pepper cakes have no pepper in them. Hess writes that similar recipes of the period do sometimes include pepper, so it may have been an accidental omission.  It's possible that Mrs. Washington left it out, but could our founding mother have been so careless?  USA!?  USA!?  USA!?  I decided to cover my bases and make some cakes with pepper and some cakes without.  I massaged about a half teaspoon of pepper into three of them.

The three in the back are the peppery ones.

After applying my oil-molasses glaze, I baked at 350 until the cakes seemed to harden on the outside (about 15 minutes).

THE TASTING

Pepperless Pepper Cakes:  Pretty good.  Considering how much molasses and anise are in here, I was surprised to find that the predominant flavor was actually the orange peel.  In the end the sweetness, anise flavor, and orange flavor blended quite nicely.  My girlfriend, Laura, thought that there were too many suckets to keep these things in the enjoyable range.  While I agree that I put too much in, I think the cakes are still palatable, and that the mixture of anise and orange is a pleasant blending

Some of the glaze ran off and hardened on the baking sheet.  These crispy bits were delicious, and had a very satisfying texture (though I don't think that was an intentional part of the recipe).  The texture of the cake as a whole is, predictably, a little tough, but I'd bet that's what lets it last "a quarter to halfe a year."  A visiting friend, Alex, also sampled the cakes. He liked the suckets less than I did, and does not like the taste of anise.  Upon trying a bite of the finished cake, his face crinkled with what I would call "disgustappointment."  Suffice to say he was less than enamored of them.

That's right.  It's a creepily sexualized Obama emerging from

a sea of roses while a white stallion prances in the background.

Peppered Pepper Cakes:  I probable put too much pepper in these.  They tasted surprisingly spicy (once again, wussy black pepper is doing some heavy lifting).  Alex liked these even less, claiming that he doesn't like his desserts to burn him.  But I guess if widdow baby can't handle his gingowbwead he can just move to CANADA!... USA!  USA!  USA!  (editor's note: my copyeditor (again Laura) thought this wasn't very nice.  You know what else wasn't very nice?  Vietnam!  THESE COLORS DON'T RUN!)

As an additional experiment, I will also be testing Ol' Martha's claim that these will last me 3 - 6 months.  I will be saving at least one of these and sampling part of it in October, and the rest in January.  We'll see how the taste compares in 2010.

Overall Consensus:  Tasty, but nowhere near perfect.  I'm docking a few points for the tough texture, and the overwhelming taste of the suckets.

Final Grades:  

Pepperless Cakes: B-

Peppered Cakes: C

America: A++++++++, times infinity.

Tuh'u Beet Broth

Dish: Tuh'u Beet Broth

Country of Origin: Babylon, Mesopotmia (modern day Iraq)

Year: Approximately 1600 BCE

Source: Yale Culinary Tablets, Tablet A; translation through The Oldest Cuisine in the World by Jean Bottero.

This is it: the oldest recipe I could find. It was written down on a cuneiform tablet more than 3600 years ago in southern Mesopotamia. The tablet is the first in a series of three, currently being held at Yale University: the first two together contain about thirty-two recipes; the third is mostly illegible.

I thought the gruel and the squid recipes were vague, but they're nothing compared to the ones on these tablets. Once again, the quantities of the ingredients are not listed. On top of that, some of the words have been worn off of the tablet (marked by brackets in translation). Others are untranslatable (transcribed phonetically in translation). Take, for example, this recipe for "Meat Broth":

Meat broth. Meat is used. Prepare water; add fat [ ], mashed leek and garlic, and a corresponding amount of raw suhutinnu.

Really? Meat is used in the meat broth? What kind of meat? What kind of fat? What is missing in the eroded section? What the hell is suhutinnu? How do you cook it? And on, and on, and on. The tablets have no asnwers. Some of the recipes have more descriptive directions, such as "To Prepare a Bird Slaughtered for a timru Ceremony," but the previously mentioned vagaries remain. Also, I think we can all agree that this is hardly the time of year for a timru ceremony.

Ultimately, I settled on a recipe that seemed mostly intact, that also uses a wide variety of ingredients. The translation follows:

Tuh'u Beet Broth. Lamb meat is used (?). Prepare water; add fat. Peel the vegetables. Add salt; beer; onion; arugula; coriander; samidu; cumin, and the beets. Assemble all the ingrediets in the cooking vessel and add mashed leeks and garlic. Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander, and suhutinnu.

SUBSTITUTIONS AND NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

1) Lamb meat is used (?): Lamb meat is used (!). No time to second guess the translator here; I'm using lamb and I'm going to be excited about it.

2) Fat: Fat appears in just about every recipe, and is likely some kind of animal fat. I don't have lard on hand, so I used butter instead, and didn't trim the fat off of the lamb meat.

3) Beer: Beer was extremely important to the ancient world. More than just a source of alcohol, beer was a method of keeping grain from spoiling for long periods of time. I was not sure what beer to use to approximate best the beer of yesteryear. Hops was not used in beer at this time, so I tried to steer clear of pale ales and other distinctly hoppy beers. I also avoided lagers, since these emerged from a strain of yeast sometime around the Holy Roman Empire. Beers in ancient Mesopotamia were often made by fermenting bread, so I imagined them to be pretty thick (though in retrospect, I think this is faulty logic). Porter, being a dark ale, seemed like a good choice. It may not be the best substitute, but it was my best guess when I was shopping.

4) Samidu and Suhutinnu: Scholars don't know what these words are. They know it was some kind of spice or seasoning. Here my substitutes are wild guesses based on spices that a frequently used in middle-eastern cooking today, but not already found in this particular recipe. I used allspice for samidu and turmeric for suhutinnu.

5) Ambiguous beets, cumin, and coriander: Beets could refer to beet root or beet stalk, cumin to seeds or ground cumin, and coriander could mean coriander seeds, or cilantro. I used all of them to cover my bases.

6) A note about onions: Ancient Mesopotamians loved onions. You'll notice this recipe alone contains onions, leeks, and garlic. I had a feeling that this was going to be a stinky dish (but was pleased to find that it wasn't).

COOKING

I had a lot of decisions to make about how to go about preparing this dish. First, I had to decide how much of each ingredient to use. I made some more arbitrary choices, starting with the amount of lamb to use. DECISION: a pound and a half because that's how much was in the package I bought. I built my other ingredients around the lamb, basing it on a a very unscientific "does this look right" system. DECISIONS! Two leeks, one onions, six cloves of garlic, spices to taste. I settled on three beets, which was maybe one beet more than I needed, but I figured it's BEET broth, and if there's any place to splurge, it's beets. All this, basically, because I felt like it.

Once that was settled I had to figure out just how I wanted to cook it. The directions are a little confusing in that they require I start "adding" ingredients to my "prepared water" before "combining" everything in my "cooking vessel." If that's the case what was I adding them to before putting them in the cooking vessel? And wait a minute, how do I prepare the water? And I hope these peeled vegetables just refer to the beet root, because I didn't get anything else. The directions, which first seemed so clear, became more confusing, the more I looked at them, so I developed a strategy.

I broke down my ingredients and saw that I had meat, tough vegetables that take a long time to cook (beets, beet stalks, onions, leeks), and soft leafy vegetables (arugula, beet leaves) that take only a few minutes. With this in mind, I stewed, adding my ingredients little by little.

I browned my lamb with my "fat" (butter) for about 5 minutes.

If this looks weird, it's because these are the bony pieces. The other pieces

are on the plate in the background.

Then I softened my tough veggies (sans leeks) in the drippings for another 5 minutes,

Added beer, water, and spices and let it all stew together.

Despite its appearance, this is not a handful of twigs in a pot of blood.

At this point I began to get a sinking feeling that this was all going to end horribly. I was relying too much on random guesses and uncertainties, and not enough on what I knew would work. Every stir in the pot clanged around tough bones and stiff stalks. After a while, though, a great smell began wafting out of the pot. Really, just an awesome, spicy, roast meat and vegetable smell. I took a peek inside, and -- hey! -- it looked like soup. Granted, it was a blood-red soup full of bones and weird looking stalks, but it was soup.

After about a half hour, I added the leeks and garlic (because the recipe specified to add these later). Twenty minutes after that, I added the leafy vegetables. Ten minutes later, dinner was served.

Garnished with cilantro, coriander, and turmeric.

THE TASTING

Disappointing. The broth didn't taste as good as it smelled. The biggest problem was a strange bitterness to the whole thing. I kept trying to place it, and kept settling on different culprits. It's the beet stalk, it's the beer, it's the gaminess of the lamb, it's the cumin seeds. Ultimately I decided that it was probably a combination. All these ingredients have a little bit of bitterness to them, and in this dish they melded together to make some kind of franken-bitter.

It was also VERY rich. A thick layer of oil pooled at the top as I ate. I'm not one to shy away from fatty foods; more often than not I'm the Paula Dean put-more-butter-in-it camp, but the fat didn't really incorporate into the dish, and it was a bit much to handle.

Adding more salt and spices to my individual bowl cut down on the bitterness, and made it much more palatable, but that couldn't get rid of the rich oiliness. I intend to skim off as much from left-overs as I can.

You don't have to look too closely to see the oil on top.

I don't want to create the impression that this was really bad -- it wasn't. The beet flavor paired with the lamb was a new and delicious combination for me, and though the aforementioned richness has its downsides, it feels very hearty, and would be great for keeping your energy up while toiling in the fields, or ruling an empire, or, y'know, building civilization. There's just a too-large gulf between the way it smelled and the way it tasted, and disappointment was inevitable.

Overall Consensus: Not bad, but not great either. Many of the bad parts of this dish were likely my fault and problems of proportion. I will probably eat most of leftovers, and experiment with different seasonings to highlight to good parts and downplay the bad.

Some things I might have done differently: use a lighter ale for the beer, and probably less beet stalk, or at least cut it into smaller pieces. Less cumin seeds and more salt. I probably wouldn't have cooked the bones in the soup either. I had hoped this would thicken it up, give it more flavor, and let me strip the last of the meat off, but more than anything else it just made the soup difficult to eat.

Final Grade: C

Grading

I've decided to start grading the dishes I cook.  The rubric is as follows:

A:  This is great, and probably something I'm going to keep cooking on a regular basis.

B:  Good, but it has its flaws.  I'll probably make it again with some changes to recipe, and probably not with any kind of regularity.

C:  Thoroughly mediocre.  This is the sort of dish that would instill neither joy nor anger.  I probably wouldn't make it again, not because it tastes bad, but because I will have forgotten about it.

D:  Edible, but not enjoyable.

F:  It is a good thing that this dish was lost to the sands of time.

I may decide to assign a "+" or "-" with the letter grade if it has some particularly redeeming or damning qualities.

I have retroactively given the Barley Gruel a grade of "D+"

Braised Squid, Roman Style

Dish: “In Lolligine in Patina” (A Pan of Squid)

Country of Origin: Italy (Roman Empire)

Year: Late 300s/ early 400s

Source: De re coquinaria by Caelius Apicius; translation through The Roman Cookery of Apicius by John Edwards.

After my last post I received a helpful suggestion from a friend on how to improve this blog: weird animals or animal parts. While this raises some questions about whether my friends have my best interests at heart, it is a good way to increase the entertainment value of this blog. Squid may not be especially weird, but since I can't find a butcher who will sell me flamingo meat, it will have to do for now.

De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking") is attributed to Caelius Apicius, a noted Roman glutton. He is said to have loved eating so much that he spent almost all of his wealth on food, and then, upon realizing he had little money left for MORE food, poisoned himself to avoid the horrors of starvation. This is a man who clearly understands food, and so I put myself in his capable hands for a dish aptly titled "A Pan of Squid." Here is a direct translation of the recipe:

A pan of squid: Mix pepper, rue, a little honey, stock, boiled wine, and drops of olive oil.

Dammit! Once again we have a recipe that is a list of ingredients, with no directions. This time there aren't even any quantities listed. John Edwards writes in the introduction that Apicius’s book was written for chefs, and his recipes were more suggestion than instruction. Luckily, Edwards also provides modern, modified recipes for many of Apicius’s recipes. I compared his recipe with the original, and with a third recipe for braised squid in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I developed a workable recipe by combining these three, using Apicius's ingredients, Edwards's quantities, and Bittman's technique. (That recipe is reprinted at the end of this post, if anyone else out there is feeling adventurous).

SUBSTITUTIONS AND NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

1) Rue: Rue was a commonly used herb in Roman cuisine, for its supposed medicinal qualities. I learned that rue is a little more difficult to find these days, probably because it is narcotic in large doses, its juice is an irritant, contact with its leaves can cause dermatitis, and pregnant women are advised not to eat it. Apparently rosemary is a good subsitute. I chose to use rosemary rather than hunt down the crazy herb of death.

2) Boiled Wine: Roman wines were different from the wines of today, with a much higher sugar content. They were frequently used as a sweetener for sauces (as in this recipe). Boiled wine is wine reduced by half, to make it even sweeter. The original recipe called for boiled wine, Edwards's recipe does not. I used boiled wine.

3) Fish stock: I shamefully admit that I didn’t make my own fish stock, and instead used fish boullion. This is bending the rules I set down in the first post, but I don't think it's breaking them. I have already paid the price for it. The boullion made a stock that smelled like the fish food I once fed my goldfish. It was still usable, but there is no doubt in my mind that you would get a better flavor with freshly made fish stock.

COOKING

Most of what I found interesting about cooking this dish had to do with preparing the squid, something I’ve never done at home. This is an animal that seems like it was made to be taken apart. You rip off the head, and all the entrails come with it, leaving behind a tube of meat. At least, that's what happens in theory. In practice a few of my squid lift some of their less appetizing organs behind, and I had to dig them out. I popped the ink sac of one of them, and another one was full of little squid eggs. Let's get a close up of these guys:

Beautiful. Cleaning the animals took a long time (removing the skin, rinsing out all the ink), but once I finished, everything else was pretty easy. I chopped them into rings and gave them another rinse.

I boiled the wine and made my sauce (pepper, rosemary, honey, wine, fish stock) in a matter of minutes:

After sauteeing the squid with some olive oil, I added the sauce, covered it, and let it cook.

A little less than an hour later, I reduced the sauce until thick, and BOOM -- I had dinner.

THE TASTING

This was pretty damn good. Squid is often tough and rubbery, but braising it in the liquid for so long made it pretty tender. The flavor was equal parts sweet, spicy, and seafood. Squid has a distinct flavor, which really came through in this dish. I was also surprised by how much of a kick this had with only black pepper, a spice I normally consider the wussiest of the spices (for the record, most awesome: cumin). My biggest complaint was that the squid shrank a lot during cooking. What started out looking like a lot of food cooked away into a very small serving. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though: the flavors in this dish were good, but also very strong – and the amount of squid I ended up with was the perfect amount for tasting.

Overall Consensus: Delicious. If the preparation didn’t take so long, and if it didn’t cook down into non-existence, I would continue to make this on a daily basis with some slight changes. I'd recommend using regular wine instead of boiled wine (as Edwards suggests), which would cut back on the sweetness. Using a homemade fish stock would probably be better than the boullion. I would probably also double the amount of squid used if you want to make it a full meal -- a pound of pre-cleaned squid seems to be about a half pound of usable squid meat.

Final Grade: B

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Recipe

1 lb. fresh squid

1 T. olive oil

½ t. ground pepper

¼ t. rosemary

1 t. honey

1 c. fish stock

¼ c. boiled white wine

Clean and cut up squid. Sautee in olive oil for 2 minutes. Meanwhile, crush pepper and rosemary together; combine with honey, fish stock and boiled wine in a pot and bring to a boil. Pour over the squid and simmer on low heat, covered, for 40 minutes. Uncover and increase heat to reduce sauce until thick (5-10 more minutes).

Barley Gruel

Dish: Barley Gruel

Country of Origin: England

Year: 1664

Source:  The Cookery Book of Mary Bent from the John Hodgkin Collection of Cookery Books.

 

Starting this project, I had a daunting choice ahead of me.  Of all the recipes in all time in all the world, where should I start?  After some careful thought, I settled on today’s recipe “To Make Barley Gruel” from a cookbook probably compiled by a woman named Mary Bent in 1664.

 

Why gruel?  From a pragmatic point of view, it seemed an easy place to start.  The simplicity of gruel guaranteed that the ingredients were few, cheap, and available.  More than that, though, I just find gruel funny.  It has a wholly unappetizing name, and is often depicted as slop just barely meeting the minimum requirements to be labeled “food.”  It seems to provide sustenance, but no enjoyment.  Could it really be that bad?  Or was Oliver was actually on to something when he asked for more?

 

I had already purchased my missing ingredients and was excited to start cooking when I met my first snag.  This recipe, unlike all the others in this particular book, had no instructions.  It was just a list of ingredients.  Here it is printed with its original spelling and punctuation:

 

“Take 4 quarts of fresh watter 3 ounces of pearl barley half a pound of Curraines an half a pound of raison one Lemon a quarter of an ounce of Cinniomon alittel mace sweet it with Suger and brick wine to your taste.”

 

Not to be deterred, I developed a theory: no instructions were included because all I needed to do was throw it all in a pot and heat it up.  It's just gruel, right?

 

SUBSTITUTIONS

1)    Nutmeg is a pretty good, and pretty standard substitute for mace, and I already have nutmeg handy.

2)    More disappointing to me was my inability to find currants, which do have a distinct flavor.  I decided to just double up on the raisins.

3)    I have no idea what brick wine is, but I’m sure it isn’t Carlo Rossi, which is what I used.

 

COOKING

It seemed to me the best way to approach this was to cook the barley until it resembled what I imagined gruel to look like, then add the spices and raisins.  Adding the barley to the gruel revealed the ridiculous proportion of actual food to water.  Here was a pot with a gallon of water to about ¾ cup of barley.  I knew the barley would plump up as it cooked, and I hoped that at some point it would just break apart into a porridge/paste consistency.  The only way to find out was to start boiling.

 

Making the barley look like gruel took a lot longer than I thought or hoped.  The barley swelled, but never burst, and there was still A LOT of water in the pot.  After about three hours enough water had evaporated to leave a bubbling sputtering mess of barley suspended in cloudy liquid.  

This was, I decided, as close to gruel as I was ever going to get with this method.  I added the remaining ingredients, gave it a good stir, and waited a few more minutes for the flavors to blend.

 

THE TASTING

Here I had my tiny bowl of gloop and plumped up raisins.  It looked a little like oatmeal and smelled like Christmas – cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins and lemon definitely conjured up thoughts of spiced cider and cinnamon buns.  As for the taste: overwhelmingly raisiney.  I suppose that’s to be expected; there is, after all, a pound of raisins in this damn thing, but the experience of eating the gruel was basically that of eating raisins, with a lemon aftertaste.  The barley itself was not a major player in this performance, at least in terms of taste.  It did provide texture, and a thick substrate in which to suspend the raisins, but for something called "barley gruel" I was expecting more barley flavor.  I tried to get a sense for what it would taste like without the raisins, and took a bite of just barley.  Here the taste of lemon juice took over.  This led me to wonder whether the “one lemon” that the recipe called for actually supposed to be just the lemon zest, or maybe “one smaller lemon” 

 

Overall consensus:  Honestly, it’s not THAT bad.  Certainly not as bad as I was expecting gruel to be (though admittedly, this seems to be a highly spiced and flavored gruel).  It seems to rely on a sort of “tofu philosophy” of tasting like whatever you put in it (in this case raisins, raisins, raisins – have I mentioned it tastes like raisins?).  It’s certainly not something I would want to eat with any kind of regularity.  Which was bad news because…

 

THE AFTERMATH

I also discovered something else that I’m likely to find with a lot of these recipes.  People cooked a lot of food at once.  I sampled my little bowl, and found that I still had TWO QUARTS of the stuff remaining.  I figured I'd just eat some for breakfast and threw it in the refrigerator.  Here I discovered that gruel, when cold, hardens in to a horrifyingly solid gruel brick.

 

Note to self:  adjust recipe based on likely portion size

Final Grade: D+

An Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Past Repasts.  The goal of this blog is to unearth ancient and obscure recipes, recreate them, and then – of course – to eat the finished product.  I have no doubt that I will make a lot of horrible, horrible food, but I also hope to find some forgotten gems of deliciousness.

My Rules:

(1)  Try to stick to the original ingredients:  The goal is to recreate the dish as near as possible to how it was originally made.  If I can’t find a required ingredient, I will find a good substitute.

(2)  Try to stick to original technology:  I will allow myself the stove and the oven, since building earth ovens and fires every week sounds like I bit much.  However, I will try not to use electric mixers, food processors, etc.

(3) No Geographic Boundaries:  Recipes from any country are acceptable.  Any recipe older than 1800 is fair game.  The older the better.

 

I expect to be challenged by obscure ingredients, foreign languages, and crappy penmanship.  It's going to be fun.

 

Next Entry:

Barley Gruel: 50 million orphans can’t be wrong... Can they?