Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After our hostess made the trifle, the wife of another one of my husband’s colleague’s arrived with her little boys. 

The boys played with Florence and called her “baby doll.”  The women drank cuppas of tea, and  I supervised; Florence was small and real and not a doll despite running around and pushing the boys on the floor.

I was discovering that baking was an English woman’s great asset.  We ate a beautiful apple-spice cake that the other woman guest made at home before visiting.  I knew that walnuts in banana muffins were what vegetarians considered to be a hidden protein and thought baking was a tremendous skill to acquire one day.

After tea, our hostess began to chop vegetables as we talked.  I volunteered to help, but our hostess would hear none of it.

At 4 pm, another set of sons arrived home from school, they changed out of their uniforms and played a little with Florence before going at each other to play mock-rugby.

Florence rejoined the ladies where we could feed her biscuits and juice.  The men arrived around 6 pm and dinner began.

We ate the crudités with the hummus and taramosalata.  Our hostess ordered Indian “take-away curries, masalas, and saags.”  “Take-away” means “take-out.”  I loved my British English lessons.

The wines I selected at Tesco went well with the spicy Indian food – a Sauvignon Blanc from the Touraine and a Soave from the Veneto.  I also bought a Chianti like everyone did in the 1990s, but it was not right with the food.

We put on some Rolling Stones, David Bowie, the Bee Gees, and Elvis Presley music and danced.  I danced with the kids in a circle and Laurent was teaching “The French Rock” moves imitating Travolta to the English women. 

The guys came over to dance with Florence, the boys and me in a circle.  The kids conked out, and the adults kept dancing until the windows steamed up.

We opened up the windows for air at 3 am and finished eating the spicy, Indian saags, masalas, and curries.

Laurent and I went home laughing and wanted to come back and visit Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern England one day.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in London: Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When we arrived at the house, my husband’s colleague’s wife made tea and served us larges mug of it with milk and called it a “cuppa.” 

She opened several boxes of biscuits, placed pretty paper doilies on a plate, and nicely arranged the butter cookies for us to dunk in our tea.  I had indulged in so much stroller aerobics during my visit that I knew I could indulge a bit.

Florence sat in her stroller throne and ate butter cookies while the trifle class began, and I loaded up on cookies (biscuits).

The day before, our hostess cut up a sponge cake and layered the bottom of a round bowl with it.  As I watched, she placed a layer of strawberry jam on top of the sponge cake and sliced fresh strawberries on top of this.

She said you could use any kind of fruit and jelly of the same fruit in the trifle.  Next, you add a layer of yolk-colored vanilla custard on top of this fruit and jelly layer.

On top of this custard layer, she placed shavings of chocolate, which we ate with our “cuppas” of tea.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in London: Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of the best memories I have of our trips to London was spending a day with one of my husband’s colleague’s wives making a trifle pudding dessert. Trifles resemble Appalachian Banana Pudding, so this has become a two-part series.

Our family friend picked Florence and me up early in the morning and off we went to do grocery shopping at Tesco.  We bought vegetables to cut up for crudités as well as hummus and taramosalata – Greek caviar spread. 

I liked being able to buy ethnic food items at the local grocery store like Laurent and I did in Chicago at the Treasure Island store downtown where we lived in Marina City – the corncob towers.

Back in London, we bought a package of vanilla custard to make the “trifle.”

I told Laurent’s colleague’s wife about the banana pudding my aunts used to make where you would layer the sides and bottoms of a glass baking dish with vanilla wafers and place sliced bananas on top of the vanilla wafers.

Then, my aunts would place a layer of cooked butterscotch pudding on top of the bananas and let it cool and then put a layer of vanilla pudding on top of the butterscotch pudding.  Finally, they would place a 1-inch layer of homemade whipped cream on top of this and refrigerate it.

They would eat a big piece of this with a lot of coffee with milk in it for breakfast and say it was their beauty secret.  (They all looked like Marilyn Monroe or Lucille Ball even without make-up.  I have tried to pattern a lot of my domestic life on theirs no matter where I live.  They clean their own homes, cook, do laundry, and tend to work at secretarial jobs when children are small.)

My sister Kathie babysat me as a child.  We often ate banana pudding for breakfast before going out for walks and shopping in all sorts of weather.  In the summer, we went out for a morning bus ride to Palmer Park Woods in Detroit to go for a walk and feed the ducks Cheez-Its. 

On the way back home, we would sometimes stop at a Lebanese or Chinese restaurant for lunch or Howard Johnsons.  In the summer, Howard Johnsons would let me swim, if we bought a full lunch afterwards. 

We both cleaned house after I was six years old.  I could do some simple tasks that my sister showed me how to do. 

Laurent’s colleague’s wife asked me why I did not go to private school as a child.  I told her that we all knew about Winston Churchill’s boarding school experience, because his mother Jennie was American. 

We really did not like too much corporeal punishment.  My family tried to reason with children, yelled, took away privileges, and would finally swat you once on the behind (in private), if these other measures did not work instead of hitting children.

I told her my mother preferred Montessori teaching methods and had books about it at home.  (The Sunday School I went to taught us the methods in it like cleaning up after butter cookies and lemonade at a very young age.) 

She raised both of us according to its “castello or castle management” organizational style in addition to traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I added Waldorf-Montessori-Jesuit Catholic to this later in life, because I knew how important art and music and Biblical knowledge are for personal relaxation and ethics.  I especially liked how the Hungarian Esterházys ran a great estate and hired the composer Joseph Haydn as their personal musician for nightly entertainment.

This was the American side of trifle making and child rearing practices.  To be continued….

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exploring the Wallace Collection: Visiting London's Hidden Spanish Art Collection with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring the Wallace Collection:  Visiting London’s Hidden Spanish Art Collection with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After sampling garden-to-table fare at Cricketeers outside London the night before, I put Florence in her stroller throne and went to visit the Wallace Collection in downtown London.

The guard at the entrance told me that Florence was welcome, but her stroller was not.  I picked Florence up, bought a ticket, and carried her through the exhibit.

The Wallace Collection has a great array of suits of armor, but I knew my arms could only hold Florence for so long.  I headed for the one Spanish painting that really interested me in the collection: The Annunciation by Bartolomé Murillo.

Delicate beauty typifies Murillo’s Annunciation and his other religious works.  He uses only primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) in the earthly and heavenly spheres he paints here.  The orange color in the center of the painting unites both the earthly and heavenly spheres and draws viewers’ eyes to the angel’s finger pointing to the dove in heaven.

There was no mistaking this painting as an Italian one.  The angels in heaven are not sex-sated cupids, but adorable babies; you want to play with the babys’ toes and tell them to stop being silly, so they can pay attention to the important events happening below.

Murillo’s Madonna also wears simple clothing.  She has a sewing basket next to her.  Lilies refer to her virginity.  The dove in the heavenly sphere symbolizes the Holy Ghost.

Pagan (Greek and Roman) mythology was largely absent in Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art.

There are paintings by Velasquez and Franz Hals in the Wallace Collection as well, buy my arms were tired, so I reinstalled Florence in her stroller and went to Epping for tea with honey and lemon in it.

A great little outing for people with strong arms!!

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

From the Tate Gallery I walked to the Victoria and Albert Museum (The V & A) with toddler Florence checking out the squares with houses around them.  Some of the squares had gardens while others used the squares as parking lots.

We were on Belgrave Road, which is lined with row houses surrounding fenced-in squares with gardens.  The row houses all have a similar rectangular porch with a column on either side of the door.  The small porch above the door on these homes had become a terrace in most cases with chairs and tables. 

I turned down Eccelston Street.  Somewhere along the way, I left the Borough of Westminster and entered the Royal Boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea.

There were many embassies in the royal boroughs areas with no places for crossing the street.  When I found a crosswalk, I was able to walk across the street with Florence, because the English stop at crosswalks unlike French drivers.

Most of the embassies have cute alleys called “mews,” which are dead ends on brick roads and very clean.  You find many mews liked this on the backside of grandiose townhouses.

When I arrived at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was tired from walking and just concentrated on the Italian collection.  I wanted to see Desidero Settignano’s bas relief of the Madonna and Child. 

I loved this sculpture while flipping through hundreds of photographic plates at the University of Chicago art library to memorize – artwork name, artist, century completed (artistic periods get renamed), current location, and any details that would help me memorize what the artwork looked like.  People who draw might be able to do this memorization task with sketching.  I loved being able to see this artwork as a young woman and not as a retiree.

I went through the fashion history part of the museum, which led to the Nehru Indian art galleries at the time.  These galleries had Mughal manuscripts out for viewing. 

The Mughals were Royal Indian Muslims with ties to Persians and the Rajput Warrior Dynasties.  I learned about the Mughals at the University of Chicago when my Indian art class was able to view Mughal paintings in the archives at a private class meeting at the Chicago Institute of the Arts.

I whizzed through the Chinese and Japanese collections and went back to Epping (UK) with very happy souvenirs of my trip to London. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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