The History of Butter Sculpture Is Strange, Indeed by Matthew Zuras
While the practice has some roots on the Renaissance banquet table
alongside decorative sugar displays—as well as an entirely separate history in
Tibetan Buddhism, in which yak butter and flour are mixed with pigment and
formed into intricate scenes and mandalas called tormas—butter sculpture as we
know it is an almost exclusively American phenomenon. The earliest canonical example—and, yes,
there is a butter canon—is a bas relief called Dreaming Iolanthe,
sculpted with broom straws and cedar sticks by an Arkansas farm woman named
Caroline Shawk Brooks. Displayed at the
1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Iolanthe was an instant hit, preserved over a
bucket of ice that required constant replenishment. According to Pamela H. Simpson, one of very few academics who have mapped
the history of the American butter sculpture tradition, Brooks had been doing
locals’ portraits in butter since 1867 with almost no formal artistic training.
Like many farm women of that period, she
churned the family’s butter, some of which was sold to the local community. To make her butter stand apart from the rest,
she shaped it into shells, animals, and faces, carving it by hand instead of
using the molds common at the time. Soon,
people began commissioning her to make portraits in butter, including one of
Mary, Queen of Scots. Shortly later, she
read Henrik Hertz’s play King
Rene’s Daughter and decided
to carve a sculpture in honor of the story’s heroine, Iolanthe. That became the sculpture she eventually
brought to Philadelphia, but not before it toured smaller fairs, where
thousands of people paid 25 cents each to view it. At the
1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, several states chose to bring
large butter sculptures with them—including a scene of a goddess, steer,
and bear by California. Wisconsin
eclipsed them with a 600-pound statue of a milkmaid milking a dairy cow. It was only outmatched by Minnesota, which
commissioned a sculptor named John Daniels to create a tableau of a
missionary, Father Hennepin, seated in a birch bark canoe with
two Native American guides. And,
thanks to advances in refrigeration, butter sculpture was wildly popular up to
the 1930s. During the Great Depression and World War II,
however, many pantry staples became scarce and butter sculpture’s
popularity dwindled. It was also around
this time that margarine began to replace butter in many homes due its cheaper
cost and perceived health benefits. After
the war, though, butter art came back—mostly in the form of sponsorships from
large creameries—and sculptors returned to their refrigerated cells at the
annual fairs. The most famous among them
was a woman named Norma “Duffy” Lyon, who became Iowa’s premier butter
sculptor and supplied the state fair with a butter cow each year from 1957
until she retired in 2006. https://munchies.vice.com/en/articles/the-history-of-butter-sculpture-is-strange-indeed
Author Andrew Moore encountered his first pawpaw grove
during a visit to southeast Ohio. While
attending the Ohio Pawpaw Festival with a friend, Moore was fascinated to learn
that the surrounding woods were filled with trees bearing the fruit. Although
he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, he set out on foot, scanning
the landscape for the long, symmetrical leaves that had been described to
him. It wasn’t long before he
encountered a thick stand of pawpaw trees and got his first taste of one. “I
had never heard of pawpaws until going to the festival,” recalls Moore, a
native of Florida and resident of Pittsburgh.
“I came away, like many people do, obsessed.” But
Moore also had plenty of questions. The
first was, how had he never heard of the pawpaw when it was the largest edible
fruit native to North America? As Moore
did research to quell his curiosity, he soon realized there was no go-to book
on the topic, so he started researching and writing one—a journey that took him
from Ohio to Louisiana and stretched from Arkansas to Maryland as he traversed
the 26-state region where the fruit grows wild. People
commonly say it tastes like a mix between banana and mango, and I think that’s
probably the best way to describe it.
It’s got this creamy, mild, tropical flavor. I like to say it tastes like
a mixture of banana and mango with a custard-like texture. They’re common along rivers and streams, and
they abound in Ohio, so Ohioans are lucky.
Also, learn to identify the leaves, because there are very few trees
that would look like it; very few leaves that would match it. They are very tropical—long, symmetrical
leaves that are among the largest in the eastern United States. http://www.ohiomagazine.com/Main/Articles/Pawpaw_101_5190.aspx The pawpaw has been memorialized in folk songs, poems, and with dozens
of place names from Georgia to Illinois.
For information on Andrew Moore's book Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit, see http://www.chelseagreen.com/pawpaw
TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART
EXHIBITIONS
Hot
Spot: Contemporary Glass from Private Collections through Sept. 18, 2016
Glass Pavilion Featuring more than 80
works, Hot Spot coincides
with the tenth anniversary of the Museum’s Glass Pavilion. Complementing TMA’s own focus on glass, the
exhibition shows a wide variety of contemporary objects, many never before
exhibited publicly. Free admission.
Keep
Looking: Fred Tomaselli’s Birds through Aug. 7, 2016 Gallery 6
Five painting/collages, a tapestry, and a selection of “Field Guide”
works by Fred Tomaselli are featured in the Toledo Museum of Art’s third
biennial exhibition focused on bird-related art songbirds. This exhibition, the first in this TMA series
to feature the work of a single artist, explores birds, visual perception and
transcendence in Tomaselli’s work. Free
admission. http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/
The wonderfully chewy egg pasta
farfel (also called
egg barley) is not easily found. Like
the egg cream which has no eggs in it, egg barley contains no barley, but it
does resemble cooked barley. To bring out the nutty-roast flavors and
lend appealing color, farfel is best lightly toasted before it is cooked. Many packaged brands are sold already
toasted, but if not, it's easy enough to toast the pasta bits in the oven or on
top of the stove. Some food historians
suggest a German origin, but there's a strong case to be made linking farfel to
the Hungarian tarhonya, round, tiny egg noodle balls that arrived from the
Middle East via the Balkans. At one time, supermarkets and groceries in
areas with large Jewish populations routinely carried different brands and
types of ready-made packaged farfel.
Today, while it may take a trip to a kosher market or an online search
to find, farfel is still currently produced by several makers, among them
Streit's, Manischewitz, Mother's, and Columbia from the U.S.; Osem from Israel;
Shim'on from France; and Ferencz from Canada.
http://www.centropa.org/recipes/jayne-cohen/farfel-0
It’s easy to mix up fortuitous with fortunate. After all, they both have aspects of luck and
chance in their meaning. Fortunate means
lucky, derived from the word fortune, which means luck, either good or
bad. The Romans thought of fortune as a
goddess who could be for you or against you.
Fortuitous, on the other hand, derives from the Latin
‘fortuitus’ meaning, by chance, accidental.
So a fortuitous meeting is an accidental meeting, rather than a lucky
one.
The 2016 Children’s Choice Book Awards winners have been announced.
The Children’s Choice Book Awards
are the only national book awards program where the winning titles are selected
by children and teens; they were launched in 2008 by the Children’s Book
Council and Every Child a Reader. Find
winners and link to library news at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/70260-2016-children-s-choice-book-award-winners.html
142d Kentucky Derby projected post time: 6:34 p.m.
actual starting time: 6:47
p.m. Nyquist won the Kentucky Derby by 1
¼ lengths on May 7, 2016. Ridden by
Mario Gutierrez, Nyquist ran 1 ¼ miles in 2:01.31.
The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will decide a
fascinating copyright case about cheerleaders’ uniforms. It's a big deal because the case isn’t just
about cheerleaders--it could determine whether many kinds of fashion designs
can be copyrighted. The copyright law seems simple: It says that “useful items” can’t be
protected. You can't own exclusive
rights to make dining tables or dinner plates. A uniform, like any other piece of clothing or
furniture, is useful. But that isn’t the
end of the problem. What about designs
on useful objects: a pattern on a dinner
plate or a stripe on a garment? A
literal reading of the law might suggest that these elements can’t be
copyrighted. But neither the U.S.
Copyright Office nor the courts have ever taken that extreme position. They distinguish between aspects of the design
that are part of its utilitarian function and those that aren't. Take cheerleaders’ uniforms. The fabric, cut in a certain pattern, is part
of its useful function. But what about
the chevrons and stripes that adorn them?
We aren’t talking about team logos. They're
usually considered physically and conceptually separable from the uniform and
therefore deserving of protection. If
they weren’t, the enormous sports-jersey industry wouldn’t generate revenue for
college and professional teams and leagues.
The issue before the Supreme Court is trickier. It involves design elements that are
“pictorial, graphic, or sculptural” and are woven into the fabric of the
garment. They can’t be separated physically.
But what about conceptually? In deciding VARSITY BRANDS, INC.; VARSITY SPIRIT CORPORATION;
VARSITY SPIRIT FASHIONS & SUPPLIES, INC., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. STAR
ATHLETICA, LLC, Defendant-Appellee, No. 14-5237
that the
Supreme Court will now review, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
listed no fewer than nine possible tests and approaches to measure whether a
design element can be conceptually separated from a useful article. For example, some courts ask whether the
design elements are “primary” to “subsidiary” utilitarian elements. Others ask if the artistic features are
“objectively necessary” to the performance of the useful function, or if the
useful function could “stand alone” without the design. A more overtly economic test asks whether the
object would be marketable on the basis of the design even if it lacked any
utilitarian function. http://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/cheerleading-uniform-copyright-lawsuit-gets-us-high-court-review
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1468
May 9, 2016 On this date in 1911,
the works of Gabriele D'Annunzio were placed in the Index of
Forbidden Books by the Vatican.
On this date in 1945, the Channel Islands were liberated by the British after
five years of German occupation.
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