Senf: The Mustard Society Game by Ruth Paget

Senf: The Mustard Society Game by Ruth Paget 

Number of Players: 

Unlimited as long as the mustard lasts 

Materials Needed: All the materials you need for this game can be ordered from the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin (mustardmuseum.com). 

-3 different kinds of mustard 

-pretzel sticks Game 

Preparation: 

-On a sheet of paper, note the name of the three different mustards with a line after it where players will note a number of a matching mystery mustard. Make copies of this game sheet for the number of guests coming to your game 

-Put out a dish with many pretzels so people dip once to avoid double dipping and germ spreading -cover the jars with paper so you cannot see the labels. Number them 1 – 3. 

Game Play: 

-Each guest will use one pretzel stick per mustard jar to scoop out a taste. -Guests will discuss mustards and note on their game sheet what mustard they think the mystery mustards are. 

-Take the white paper of each jar to reveal the mystery mustard. 

Everyone is a winner if you set all the mustards out to go with brats, hot dogs, or kielbasa and potato salad, coleslaw, and chips. 

People who got everything right can take a jar of mustard home, if there is any left. 

Mustards you can order from the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin include: 

-Colman’s Original English 

-Bornier Original Dijon 

-De Echte Zaanse Mustard 

-Löwensenf Bavarian 

-Lakeshore Wholegrain with Irish Whiskey 

-Bacik Spicy Horseradish and Honey 

-Amora 

-Clovis Herbes de Provence 

-Edmond Fallon Honey 

-Delicious Gourmet Big Easy Cajun 

-Pommery Moutarde de Meaux 

-Inglehoffer Sriracha 

-Kocsiusko Spicy Brown Mustard 

-Australian Outback Mustard 

-Baumgarten Horseradish Mustard 

-Löwensenf Extra Hot 

-Sierra Nevada Stout and Stone Ground 

The Mustard Museum has an online catalog that you can request to make unique parties with society games. 

Happy Gaming! 

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

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Light Lunch Wisconsin by Ruth Paget

Light Lunch Wisconsin by Ruth Paget

If you ask someone what a light lunch in Wisconsin is they might tell you, “A locally brewed beer and a bretzel” or “a strong black coffee and a pastry.” 

Then, they would wax philosophical and say, “Just appetizers, a casserole, or a spread or dip in small portions, especially in cold weather.”

I agreed with those statements and felt like it snowed nine months of the year when I lived in Wisconsin. Nine months may be too many, but seven months of snow was close to accurate. I do like high-calorie foods like those above in cold weather I have to admit. 

The immigrant groups who have come to Wisconsin have many dishes of German, Polish, Scandinavian, and Irish origin that are great winter fare. There are recipes for of all these immigrant groups in the cookbook The Best of the Best of from Wisconsin Cookbook edited by Gwen McKee and Barbara Moseley. 

Some of my favorite dishes from this cookbook include: 

-creamy horseradish ham roll-ups

-beer spread made with cheddar cheese, Swiss cheese, and beer 

-mini Reuben sandwiches made with rye bread, sour cream, corned beef, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese 

-baked cheese wings with Parmesan 

-cheddar jalapeño corn bread 

-cheese drop biscuits 

-Danishes made with jam 

-Norwegian sour cream waffles with apple pecan topping 

-Dusseldorfer sandwiches made with rye bread, tarter sauce, dill pickles, liverwurst slices, and Swiss cheese 

-Wisconsin beer cheese soup made with 5 cups of cheddar cheese

 -Polish noodles with cabbage 

-New Glarus cheese and onion pie from a recreated Swiss village town 

-Lithuanian Kugela made with bacon, onion, potatoes, milk, and eggs 

-Potatoes Romanoff made with cheese, sour cream, onion, and shredded cheese 

-Colcannon, an Irish dish, made with heavy cream, garlic, chopped cabbage, and leeks 

-chicken Calvados made with apple schnapps 

These delicious dishes give a good idea of what you make in severe weather to stay warm. Chefs and people of German and Eastern European heritage might especially enjoy Best of the Best from Wisconsin Cookbook edited by Gwen McKee and Barbara Moseley. 

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

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Trips to Clasen's European Bakery by Ruth Paget

Trips to Clasen’s European Bakery by Ruth Paget After breakfast on Saturday mornings in DeForest (Wisconsin), I would take my family on a field trip to the other side of town to Middleton where Clasen’s European Bakery is located. 

Middleton is where my mom grew up. I thought it was most civilized for having an artisanal bakery like the ones we went to when we lived in Paris, France. 

Clasen’s is a family bakery that was set up 50 years ago according to its website by Ralph and Ernst Clasen. Ralph’s daughter Michelle studied pastry in Germany and now keeps the family business going at Clasen’s. 

Wisconsin is home to German jause, light meals or strong coffee with pastries. On Sundays, we ate breakfast and did a jause mid-morning with strong Lavazza espresso made with our stainless steel espresso maker with a milk frother. (The milk frother broke from overuse.) Our Eurocrat jause standard pastry was Clasen’s pecan-cinnamon rolls. 

Other items I would buy as a Sunday dessert included slices of cherry cream cheese coffee cake, Black Forest torte, and German chocolate cake. The vanilla cakes were divine, too.

Clasen’s did some custom baking for me at Easter when I would order a chocolate lamb cake with white buttercream frosting. 

Laurent would wander and choose different kinds of rolls to try. The French have a cheese for every day of the year, and the Germans have a bread for every day of the year. So, Laurent was in a bread candy store. He loved going to Clasen’s 

What is really great about Clasen’s now is that you can order and pay online and get delivery within the continental U.S. 

I have to admit that when I was going to Clasen’s all those many years ago that I had no idea I would live in Germany one day. Supporting Clasen’s European Bakery certainly helped me adjust to life in Germany, because the bread and pastries were the same. 

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

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Aunt Winnie's Salad Dressing Recipe by Ruth Paget

Aunt Winnie’s Salad Dressing Recipe by Ruth Paget 

Serves 6 

Ingredients: 

-3/4 cup sugar 

-1 beaten egg 

-1 teaspoon mustard 

-1 teaspoon salt 

-1 tablespoon flour 

-1 teaspoon vinegar 

-1/4 cup sour cream 

Steps: 

1-Mix sugar, egg, mustard, salt, and flour together. Add vinegar. 

2-Cook mixture over medium heat until clear. 

3-Thin mixture with sour cream. 

If you like sweeter dressing, mix 1 cup sugar in with the sour cream.  

Source: Beatrice Pennington – 1964 

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

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Wisconsin $ Food Hacks by Ruth Paget

Wisconsin $ Food Hacks by Ruth Paget

Short post for big nutrition on a budget:

Oatmeal - lots of protein bang for your buck and fiber

Cranberries - full of vitamin C.

Cook fresh berries with sugar and add them to oatmeal muffins.

Maple syrup - sweetens up buckwheat pancakes

Buckwheat is a good source of iron.  Buckwheat pancakes have a sour taste, but maple syrup makes it less pronounced.

Food for thought for today.

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

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Fundraising Ideas for Historical Museums by Ruth Paget

Fundraising Ideas for Historical Museums by Ruth Paget 

I associate historical museums more with field trips than as money generating sites, but I think historical museums need to think about revenue generating activities when seeking donors or government support. 

Class field trips like the ones I took as an elementary school student to the Detroit Historical Society helped provide that organization with operating funds as well as teaching young students about the Chippewa Native Americans, French fur traders and Michigan trading posts, and the impact of the Ford Model T on American society. 

The high cost of insuring field trips has made them almost a relic of the past in public schools in cash-strapped districts. This situation has probably forced historical societies to seek donors to ensure operating funds. I love historical museums and think there are several ways they could increase revenue. 

The first way is to seek out parents who will take their own children on field trips. Reaching parents is not as easy as contacting a school board, but historical museums might think of advertising the benefits of a visit to their site to the following markets, especially if they have newsletters: 

-religious organizations 

-sport teams 

-language organizations 

-charter schools 

-K12 school groups 

-music schools 

-dance schools 

-drama groups 

When I lived in Wisconsin in the 1990s, field trips had become a parent’s responsibility. I took my daughter Florence to the Wisconsin Historical Museum on Capitol Square in Madison to see exhibits about the Ho-Chunk Nation Native Americans, the lumber and paper industries, and German and Norwegian settlers, who lived in log cabins. This is another historical museum that is important for understanding the sociological and cultural history of the state. 

Historical museums have events that other historical museums might replicate. The Pickett’s Mill Battlefield, a Georgia State Park, holds re-enactments of the Civil War Battle fought there with African-American and white troops on the Union side. This event engages volunteers and the community. Even a nominal fee to attend this re-re-enactment could raise operating funds. 

Many historical museums offer hikes around their site or long walks in the museum. Museum visitors might welcome the chance to buy items such as the following to help support the museum:  

-cold water 

-cold soda 

-cheddar cheese fish chips 

-shrimp chips 

-tortilla chips 

-potato chips 

-brownies 

-guava cookies 

-cold brew coffee 

A combination of donors, sales, and parent doing their own field trips might increase historical museum revenue to keep these community resources open and increase funds for temporary exhibits and historical documentaries shown at the site. 

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

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DeForest, Wisconsin Trip by Ruth Paget

DeForest, Wisconsin Trip by Ruth Paget  

My California family set out by car for a road trip to DeForest, Wisconsin for a Sawle Family Reunion from June 8 – 16, 2022. We drove through the states of Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. 

DeForest sits immediately off Interstates 90 and 94, north of university town Madison, Wisconsin on the way to tourist town Wisconsin Dells. DeForest is a good stop for tourists from Chicago. There are many fast food chains by the highway and Ehlenbach’s German Food and Gift Shop. 

My favorite fast food is the Wisconsin chain called Culver’s, which sells fish fry dinners everyday with 2 or 3 pieces of cod, coleslaw, a yeasty bun with butter, and crinkly fries that fill the bottom of the dinner tray. Drinks for this special are extra. Butter burgers are Culver’s main item along with daily ice cream specials – dairy land products from America’s Dairy Land. 

I lived in DeForest three years and think they did some nice things to promote local businesses and civic services. The local chamber of commerce offered a welcome wagon service that they presented to you at home or in a local food outlet. A chamber representative introduced me to local businesses like the video store, supermarket, movie theatres, library programs like summer reading and literacy programs, and farmers’ markets. The chamber representative gave me some coupons as a “welcome to the neighborhood.” I became a quick part of the community by becoming a literacy volunteer for a French woman in town. 

Ace Hardware is a business of longstanding that has gone into the food business. Besides tools, their billboard out front advertises Brat Party Kits. (Brats are bratwurst sausage.) The kits no doubt come with buns, German potato salad, coleslaw, maybe a pasta salad, and charcoal and grills, if you need them. 

About ten minutes west of DeForest in Waunakee are two good restaurants that tourists might also like – Cuco’s Mexican Restaurant and Rex’s Innkeeper. The Sawle Family Reunion was held at Rex’s, which features various kinds of steak and prime rib and excellent seafood with a soup and salad bar and yeasty buns and whipped Wisconsin butter. 

Across the street from Rex’s is Cuco’s. I like their tangy Mexican cheese enchiladas verdes with green tomatillo tomato sauce and pulled pork (carnitas) on top with beans and rice on the side. 

We did some tourism around DeForest, too, visiting towns that Laurent worked in when he was a representative for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1994 – 1996. 

In Portage, red brick Main Street bars are now wine bars that also sell chocolate, cheese, and gifts. Hot and humid summers make Wisconsin good wine growing territory. 

At the outlet malls in Johnson Creek going towards Milwaukee, there are still good deals and lots of parking. At the Pine Cone Restaurant, you can eat breakfast and fish fry all day. 

In Sun Prairie, there is now a halal market that sells meat and fine produce. There are miles of barns here that the artist Georgia O’Keefe painted in her youth. The corn in the area is used to feed dairy cows. 

In Madison, we made a pilgrimage to Metcalf’s Market to buy pancetta, Maytag Blue Cheese from Iowa, and oblong country loaves of bread to toast for breakfast. 

We ate well in Wisconsin, but left the excellent craft brewery beers to the Wisconsin cousins. 

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

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 5 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 5 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once in Wisconsin, the Sawles bought a dairy farm, set up a mill on a stream on their property, set up chicken coops, and made friends with the pig farmers down the road.  They had blackberry bushes on their property for pie and grew strawberries and cantaloupe.  They added nasturtium leaves to lettuce for salads.

Aunt Winnie also picked a white wildflower and deep fried it for lunches with salads.  I think this flower is a wild black locust flower.  The center is black, but the flowers around it are white.  Before deep-frying it, the wildflower is dunked in a batter made with egg, flour, and cream.  It crunches like a French fry, but has a sweet flavor.  I loved these as a kid.

The Sawles supplemented their basic goods at home with market goods like cheese, coffee, and oysters for New Year’s oyster stew.  I remember Aunt Winnie showing me Chinese bok choy cabbage and saying that she and Uncle Sam chopped it up to go with a vinegar-and-oil salad.  I think she alternated bok chou with baked beets dressed in vinegar-and-oil dressing as a salad.  Both are anti-oxidants.

They also bought watermelons in town and made watermelon rind pickles for winter after the cores had been eaten.

Aunt Winnie had a sense of humor.  She once made me Christmas Mincemeat pie and said you had to have beef suet in it to give the chopped fruit the right texture.  She told me that younger girls in families tended to eat a lot of it.

The farm was very self-sufficient, because bacon was eaten everyday.  Roast beef with potatoes, salad, and pie was Sunday lunch.  This farm was English and New England through heritage.  I love what my female ancestors set up after arriving here on a boat.

On the Wisconsin farm, morning glories and gladiolus flowers were permanently on the dining tables in the summer to liven up meals.

I found recipes for the cookies Aunt Winnie made in British Cookery, including saffron ones.

My great-great grandmother probably learned recipes from her female ancestors in Cornwall.  Our official family genealogists David and Frances located birth certificates and gravestones for Margaret’s ancestors including her mother with the same name – Margaret Dunn, Elizabeth Curgenven, Eliza Wakel, Frances Collett, Marry Andrew, Barbara Wills, and Jane Dorrington.

Margaret Dunn Rowe no doubt learned to make Cornish pasties filled with beef and vegetables from her mother.  Pasties resemble meat pies called empanadas from Galicia, Spain originally.

My great-great grandmother, Charlotte Sawle, live in a sea captain’s row house in Porscatho, England.  As a child, I stayed in her quayside home, which had become a bread and breakfast and collected snails on the quay stairs like my ancestors. 

Now I imagine Charlotte Sawle entertaining guests with rum-based English drinks like Cornish punch, rumstafian, and Samson.

Our family’s genealogists have documented a mother line that extends back to 1688 when one Rebecca Hay married Pasco Collins in that year.

I wonder if the chocolate fudge, brown sugar penuché fudge, and confectioner’s sugar divinity fudge that my family eats and makes comes from Pasco’s mother?

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


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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 4 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 4 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Then, Aunt Winnie confided to me what I think may have been the real reason for my mother’s family’s immigration to the U.S.”

Grandma Rowe did not like her mother-in-law; she drank too much beer.

For a woman who disapproved of drinking alcohol, being part of the Sawle clan must have been particularly onerous.

A quote from Laurence O’Tool’s The Roseland Between River and Sea perfectly illustrates Margaret’s source of consternation:

Typical is the farm outside of Gerrans called Parton Vrane…It was for long, home of a family called Sawle, and said to be a notorious haunt of smugglers.  Their practice was to land the contraband near Rosteague, and hurry across to the farm before daylight.  Here it was hidden, until it could be carried inland by bridle paths, or taken to the nearby lane to the creek.  There was always a ready market for cheap spirits among the tinners across the Fal.

Given this family background, great-great grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe convinced her husband Stephen to sell his ship, the Naiad, and go settle in the United States.

The Sawles entered the United States at Philadelphia and set out for Wisconsin with 21 covered wagons of goods after taking a side trip to Niagra Falls.

End Part 4.

To be continued..

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

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The buckwheat pancakes Aunt Winnie served may have been an Americanization of the oatcakes made in Scotland.  Buckwheat pancakes taste like sour flour to me, but are supposed to be good for you.

I never cared for buckwheat pancakes, but I always ate two or three of them with maple syrup to please Aunt Winnie.

One Scottish food my family seems to have dropped once they settled in the U.S. was haggis.  Plenty of my ancestors must have eaten it though.  According to British Cookery, haggis has been around since the 15^th century.

Haggis is a boiled sheep’s stomach stuffed with entrails and cooked.  Dare I say, “Thank goodness, there are not too many sheep in Wisconsin.”  However, I have eaten a Mexican version of this dish and liked it, so maybe I would like haggis.

British Cookery helped me understand what I thought was an anomaly in Aunt Winnie’s kitchen – using potato water in her homemade bread.  The cookbook said that the cooks in the north countries of England used potatoes more in their cookery, since it was one of the few crops that grows well in its colder climate.  I felt like I had discovered an heirloom ring when I read that.

Aunt Winnie baked bread daily.  She told me as she would toast a few slices, “You should always make as many foods as you can yourself.  It’s better for your health.”  She taught me how to make bread by hand and recognize the elastic feel of properly kneaded and twice risen and punched down yeast bread.

Following this philosophy of life, she managed to eat a diet rich in cream, butter, and salt till she was 106.

British dishes using alcohol did not make it on family menus in the Americas thanks to my maternal great-great grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe.  Both she and my great-great grandfather Captain Stephen Sawle came from Cornwall, England in Great Britain’s southwestern peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Cornwall is famous for shipwrecks and tin mines.  Aunt Winnie told me that her grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe “wanted to come to America, so her husband would not go down with his ship.”  She was from a farming family in England.  She wanted to be landed gentry and there was plenty of land to buy in Wisconsin.

The Sawle Family did regain access to fish, though, when my grandfather Frank Sawle purchased a cabin on the Wisconsin River.  Pan fried fish is great fresh out of the water and freezes well.

End of part 3.

To be continued.

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

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lard was part of the crust recipes for pie that Aunt Winnie gave me, too.  Even though blackberries grew on the farm, Aunt Winnie only wanted rhubarb and lemon meringue pie to be part of her recipe list.  Both have a tangy, sweet taste that I love.

“Mother made her fruit pie crusts with butter,” Aunt Winnie remarked about my great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson.

“She filled the crust with sugared peaches or strawberries and would top them off with ice cream or whipped cream,” Aunt Winnie continued.

The crusts required no baking, which made me think I could even master them.

“And how many cups of fruit would she use?” I methodically asked.

“Three or four,” she answered as I thought of how good blackberries would taste in this recipe.

My great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson taught Aunt Winnie how to cook as my great-great grandmother Elizabeth McFarland taught Jeanette Hodgson how to cook.  The foods Aunt Winnie cooked were both English and Scottish.  (Elisabeth McFarland was a schoolteacher, too.)

Cooking tends to pass down through mothers.  The English Sawles ate a lot of roast beef like the English with potatoes substituted for Yorkshire pudding in the New World, but there were some Scottish items on the dairy farm menus, too, as I discovered later when I read through the cookbook British Cookery.

This particular cookbook represents a real gift to anyone interested in finding out what their British ancestors ate.  The book was compiled “Based on research undertaken for the British Information Service of Food from Britain and the British Tourist Authority by the University of Strathclyde.”

British Cookery gives a brief history of British food since 1066, including sample menus for country parsons as well as the poor, the development of meals, and the effects of foreign trade on foodstuffs.  Most importantly, British Cookery gives a regional breakdown of characteristic dishes with their recipes.

I looked up Scotland and discovered that oatmeal and pancakes were considered regional breakfast foods.  When there were groups of us staying at the dairy farm, oatmeal and buckwheat pancakes would always stream out of the kitchen in addition to eggs and bacon.

End of Part 2

To be continued.

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

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