The Vintage Reader

As a child, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Harriet, in case you haven't read the book, is a young girl who runs around with a notebook spying on people. She hides in dumbwaiters, she sits in trees, she scales roofs and peeks in windows to watch her neighbors secretly eating cat food and receiving odd statuary. When her notebook is confiscated and passed around, she loses her best friends because of some of the things she's written about them, and then she also loses her nanny, who gets married.

Much of Harriet's life seemed exotic and desirable to me. She had all of New York to run around in, apparently with no adult supervision. People took her to the drug store to get egg creams. And that's what this post is actually about: the egg cream.

I always pictured an egg cream as a frothy off-white concoction, served in a glass with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Boy, was I wrong. They apparently consist of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup. That sounds horrible, but given Harriet's love of tomato sandwiches (which also sound horrible), I don't suppose I should have expected her to have a discriminating palate.

Anyway, here's everything I needed to know about egg creams: Egg Cream, History of New York Egg Cream, Egg Cream Recipe.

72 As a 1930s wife, I am Superior Take the test!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has done a bang-up job of an online bibliography. Click on the year in the left-hand column, and the stories and their authors (along with some neat notes) come up on the right.

If I were to ever do that online bibliography of Twilight Zone magazine that I've been threatening to do since before my first blog post here, I'd do it a lot like this.

I've been following The Orwell Diaries, a blog whose posts consist of George Orwell's diary entries beginning in August of 1938. Each post appears 70 years to the day after Orwell wrote it. In today's entry, Orwell reports that he visited a fifth-century megalith; the blog entry links to a satellite view of the site on Google Maps. I'll spare you the obvious comment about that and just say I think it's really neat, and the ability to hyperlink adds a completely new dimension to an old journal.

Also, Orwell included a newspaper clipping about a method of canning fruit without heat or syrup. I need to do a little research to see if this is actually a viable method of canning, or just a labor-intensive way to get botulism.