A dear friend Mary Eileen Dobson gave me a lovely book as a gift, and she wrote on the flyleaf: To Elizabeth on “one of those days.” Love, Mary Eileen. The book she gave me was The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures by Sylvia Shaw Judson. It’s a tiny book, about 5×7 inches, contains beautiful pictures of art one side and an accompanying quote on the other. Across from a still life by Jean Chardin depicting of a chunk of bread, a bottle and a glass of wine, and a knife, resting on newsprint is this quote from Martin Buber: “One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar.”

I can’t recommend this little book too highly. It is the perfect book for “one of those days” when things aren’t going well, when we are too hurried, when our spirits cry to settle down.

A Cookbook that is also a picture collection and fascinating history lesson.

May I recommend an absolutely wonderful cookbook called The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes & Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute by Carolyn Quick Tillery?

You can read about my discovery of this cookbook in the July 2004 newsletter on www.elizabethharperneeld.com, so I won’t say more about that here.

What I will do here, though, is share an anecdote or two and Professor George Washington Carver’s peanut and molasses cake recipe.

On page 103 of the cookbook, you can read this:

Before interested housewives [Dr. Carver] demonstrated the eighteen different ways of cooking cowpeas, all of which they could carry out themselves, to a running accompaniment of words. ‘In painting the artist attempts to produce pleasing effects through the proper blending of colors. The cook must blend her food in such a manner as to produce dishes which are attractive. Harmony in food is just as important as harmony in colors.’ (more…)

This month I’d like to recommend three wonderful Josephine Tey mysteries. If you’ve read the August newsletter, you know about these delightful books. Alan Grant, an Inspector for Scotland Yard, is called upon in these books—The Singing Sands, A Shilling for Candles, and The Man in the Queue—to solve a variety of mysteries. Who killed the young man in Compartment B Seven on the train from England to Scotland and why did this young man scribble words about “stones that walk, the singing sands…” on a newspaper before he died? Who put a small pearl-handled dagger in the shoulder of a man standing in a theatre line waiting to watch a play starring his ex-girlfriend? Why did the film star Christine Clay leave a ranch in California to a house guest she had just met, writing this addition to her will only the night before she mysteriously drowned in the sea at 6AM the next morning?

Tey, born Elizabeth MacKintosh in 1897 in Scotland, is considered one of the best mystery writers of all times. If you want an afternoon of delight, pick up one of her books. It’s summer time reading at its best.