The roots of sugar plums, and their connection to festivals and holidays, stretch nearly 500 years.  In 16th-century England, the word plum not only referred to the summer stone fruit that we're familiar with today but to anything sweet, pleasant, and desirable.  At this time, sugar was both rare and precious and often used to preserve summer fruit, including plums.  Cooks would boil them in a sugar syrup, similar to the way we still make candied ginger today.  Sugaring fruit, such as plums, made them resistant to spoilage so that they could be enjoyed year-round.  A 17th-century cookbook specifically references sugaring plums in this way, calling it the "most kindly" way to preserve them as well as other small stonefruits, such as cherries.  Whether these were the original sugar plums is questionable.   https://nourishedkitchen.com/sugar-plums-recipe/  See also https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sugarplums-recipe-1948978 and https://gfreefoodie.com/sugar-plums/ and https://www.thespruceeats.com/sugarplums-520692 and https://www.rhubarbarians.com/easy-homemade-sugar-plums-recipe/   

Bermuda Cassava Pie  Usually served at Christmas  prep time:  30 minutes cook time:  3 hours  servings:  12  You may use frozen cassava thawed and drained (yucca).  If desired, meat may be added to this dish.  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/267925/bermuda-cassava-pie/   

Jessica Vincent fondly remembers embarking on frequent thrifting trips—at secondhand stores, yard sales, flea markets—with her mother as a child.  It’s a habit she retained into adulthood, and one that on December 13, 2023 turned into a six-figure windfall for the Richmond, Virginia native (and the art and design auction house Wright), when a glass vase she purchased for $3.99 at Goodwill sold for over $107,000.  “When I first heard Jessica’s story and saw the image of the vase, I knew this was the real deal,” Wright’s founder, Richard Wright, told CNN in an email following the sale, adding:  (Scarpa’s) work in glass was among the most innovative on the island of Murano.  The ‘Pennellate’ series was not widely produced or purchased in its day—so it is quite rare to find a work such as this one.”   Experts from the auction house soon visited Vincent to confirm the piece’s authenticity.  The vase was then listed as part of Wright’s “Important Italian Glass” sale with a valuation of between $30,000 and $50,000.  The final sale price more than doubled the top estimate.  “They were like, ‘Yeah, this is really good,’” Vincent recalled. “Some people were throwing out different makers and designers, until one person was like, ‘Oh, that’s Carlo Scarpa … very top shelf, every collector’s dream.’”  It transpired that the vase is from the “Pennellate” series that Scarpa, an architect who also dabbled in glassware and furnishings, designed for Venini in 1942, during his tenure as the company’s creative director.  The term “Pennellate” translates as “brushstrokes,” in reference to the pieces’ painterly appearance.  The vase demonstrates Scarpa’s “concept of a vase as canvas,” auction house Wright wrote in its listing for the piece, adding that production numbers for the series were “very low—likely because the pieces were so difficult to make.”  “When I first heard Jessica’s story and saw the image of the vase, I knew this was the real deal,” Wright’s founder, Richard Wright, told CNN in an email following the sale, adding:  “(Scarpa’s) work in glass was among the most innovative on the island of Murano.  The ‘Pennellate’ series was not widely produced or purchased in its day—so it is quite rare to find a work such as this one.”  Experts from the auction house soon visited Vincent to confirm the piece’s authenticity.  The vase was then listed as part of Wright’s “Important Italian Glass” sale with a valuation of between $30,000 and $50,000.  The final sale price more than doubled the top estimate.  Alex Rees See picture at https://www.cnn.com/style/thrift-store-vase-auction-carlo-scarpa-venini/index.html     

It’s easy to understand why people confuse bison and buffalo.  Both are large, horned, oxlike animals of the Bovidae family.  There are two kinds of bison, the American bison and the European bison, and two forms of buffalo, water buffalo and Cape buffalo.  Contrary to the song “Home on the Range,” buffalo do not roam in the American West.  Instead, they are indigenous to South Asia (water buffalo) and Africa (Cape buffalo), while bison are found in North America and parts of Europe.  Despite being a misnomer—one often attributed to confused explorers—buffalo remains commonly used when referring to American bison, thus adding to the confusion.  Another major difference is the presence of a hump. Bison have one at the shoulders while buffalo don’t.  The hump allows the bison’s head to function as a plow, sweeping away drifts of snow in the winter.  Amy Tikkanen   https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-buffalo-and-bison    

December 20, 2023  Museums, galleries and archives have been urged to tighten their cyber security following the massive ransomware attack on the British Library.  The library fell victim to a major hack by the criminal group Rhysida in October, 2023 that has left it severely incapacitated.  The institution’s online systems and services are suffering ongoing disruption, while large parts of its IT estate were destroyed or encrypted and it initially lost access to basic communication tools such as email.  The gang demanded £600,000 in bitcoin as ransom for the stolen data, and later attempted to auction off a significant amount of sensitive customer and staff details on the dark web.  Last week it dumped almost 600 gigabytes of leaked material online.  The incident has caused alarm among many museum and archive organisations, which are overwhelmingly reliant on digital technology for everything from booking systems to collections management and documentation.  “Libraries, research and education institutions are being targeted, whether for monetary gain or out of sheer malice.”  The library's teams are working to develop hybrid services and workarounds that can restore some level of access to the collection while a broader programme of secure infrastructure rebuilding gets underway.  From early in 2024 there will be a phased return of some key services, starting with a reference-only version of the main catalogue, which will be back online from 15 January.  The National Cyber Security Centre provides guidance on staying safe online and actions to take following a data breach.  Geraldine Kendall Adams  https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2023/12/museums-on-alert-following-british-library-cyber-attack/    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2760  December 22, 2023