Vintage Living Today For A Future Tomorrow

Newly-discovered food recipes from a 12th century Durham Priory manuscript have been found to pre-date the earliest known ones by 150 years. The recipes are to be recreated at a Durham University event later in the month.

The Latin manuscript mainly consists of recipes for medical ointments and cures and was compiled and written at Durham Cathedral’s priory around 1140. The work was recently been re-examined and found to contain the food recipes, which experts believe are amongst the oldest in the western medieval culinary tradition, preceding the previously known examples from circa 1290. The manuscript is now held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.

Mr. Hornaday's War is a long-overdue bigoraphy of William Temple Hornaday, first director of the Bronx Zoo, who helped launch the American conservation movement.

The title -- and cover image -- gave me this impression: This book is going to be about women taking back the kitchen and crafts (and all the things once called "women's work") and are refusing to be told that they are anti-feminist or backward-thinking for doing so. They are reclaiming the word "domestic" from its status as a slur.

Yes . . . but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Matchar explains that that is what we think we're doing (there's the motive) but what we're really accomplishing, if we truly believe ourselves to be feminists, might be shooting ourselves in the feet (there's those repercussions).

...Some women who are quitting their jobs to bake bread and grow veggies and homeschool their kids are saying, as I did, when I dropped out of the workforce, "Work sucks and it ain't getting any better. Screw the middleman. I'm my boss now and my job is to feed my family." As noble as this seems (and, yeah, I was getting a bit of a head), Matchar thinks that we have jumped off a ship that isn't sinking, as we thought, but is, in fact, still struggling to get out of the harbor. Feminism hasn't failed -- it just isn't done yet. Just as we don't have total racial equality even though we have laudable civil rights laws, we don't have equality between the sexes, either -- not in employment or anywhere else. To use another metaphor, our mothers didn't fail to win, they just started the fight. They tagged us in and we've walked away.