"Prepare the sheep's head in the usual way."
So sayeth the rather unhelpful opening instructions to a recipe for Sheep's Head Stew, according to a popular Edwardian-era recipe book consulted by the doughty domestic historian Ruth Goodman on the olde BBC programme Edwardian Farm.*
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| Time-travelling farmers, Alex, Ruth, Peter & Chums |
Even Your Correspondent, a two-year long Carnivore, doesn't have an autopilot procedure for tackling such a beast's bit**. When, I hear you cry, did such traditional knowledge fall out of the domestic sphere? Ditto, as another for inst., olde dressmaking patterns, with their spare and breezy instructions to go ahead and sew up some complicated garment as you "ordinarily would". The Edwardian era was only just over a century ago, merely twice the temporal distance from my earliest memories, and without the aid of Mr. Google, I have no notion how to prepare a head o' mutton for the pot nor sew a leg o' mutton sleeve. For shame!
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| Leg o' Mutton sleeves, if you please |
Back to Dear Ruth on the telly, she was preparing this frugal yet filling aforementioned staple while her fellow time-travelling adventurers had gone off to cook some limestone in a kiln for several days, as you do when the rather acidic soil on the farm you are to work needs some tonnes of quicklime and there is no local agricultural store to pop into, it being, you know, not invented yet. For the Gentleman Viewer this was an instructive lesson for when the agro-chemical industrial complex goes up in smoke, and some back-to-basics is required to keep starvation from the door, for forgotten manly commonplaces necessary to life lie thick on the ground these days.
Indeed, the observant reader will have already gleaned many valuable tidbits from around these pages, (granted, all unsolicited advice, but provisioning against the end-of-days has become rather a niche herein and I am confident you will thank me later), viz. the tongue of a hoopoe will restore the memory of a forgetful person, amongst the many choice nuggets.
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| A hoopoe for those who forgot what it even was |
And, of course, will have noted that the Pipistrellos have at their fingertips a most excellent book of instruction on keeping calm and carrying on when the electricity is switched off forever, and thusly a perpetual source of practicality and delight, and from which I share from time to time over at my Commonplace Book:
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| Chockfilled with canny know-how |
But today's cautioning about the slippery slope to a new dark age, Dear Reader, is less to do with such diverse canny know-how falling by the wayside, like how to clear a blocked chimney (Edwardian Farm tip: feed down a bundle of scouring holly!), and more to do with the sort of permanent cultural amnesia which besets us when we stop thinking about once-quotidian abstract ideas. Or, to put it plainly, how if you don't use it you lose it. Like the forgotten habit of Biphasic Sleep.
Apparently, up until the Industrial Revolution, we humans slept in two stages between sundown and sunrise, our so-called First and Second Sleeps, separated by The Watch, when we were up and about for an hour or so and getting on with things prosaic, practical or personal. Who knew?
Since self-help books in the olden days were confined to the Properly Improving, such as The Art of Dying Well ***or Galateo: The Rules Of Polite Behaviour**** (and good paper would never be frittered away on the Blindingly Obvious, like perhaps a little pamphlet entitled Muttonheads Guide To Sleep), when sleeping (or attempting to) straight through the night came into vogue for various reasons, since nothing was written down reminding us otherwise, we basically, and incredibly, forgot how we used to sleep.
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| Daresay Flaming June never forgot how sleep worked |
Which is a comfort to know, really, for those beset with middle-of-the-night insomnia, and for which is recoursed judicious applications of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral and the like. Embrace The Watch! could become a catchcry, if not just for reminding ourselves how our forebears lived their lives.
We really need to take notice of stuff and write things down. And the more pedestrian the better. This is the rôle of the diarist, of course, and the contemporary writer, to capture the zeitgeist, not I. The occasional scribblings around here tend to hearken back more to nostalgic doings, coloured with purple prose since English is fun, and anyways is really only useful while the electricity works and the cloud can keep it all going. But at least I've figured out that if we stop doing and thinking about the stuff we take for granted, it's possible to wake up one day and hey presto! it's the Dark Ages again. No fun.
ps: And don't get me started on the pruning of Nature Notes words, like acorn and kingfisher, from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make space for so-called technology words like blog and voice-mail! Call me old fashioned but blog, as fond as I am of this little playground, is hardly going to be a forever word worthy of muscling out beauteous words like bluebell. Remember, kids, if you don't use it you lose it!
* Thank you, Dear Cro, sidebar resident over at Magnon's Meanderings for the televisual heads-up this week!
** Although, I do know how to prepare lamb's fry! As I tiny tot I would volunteer to do so as I found holding the liver under the running cold tap and skinning the membrane to be a strangely sensual experience.
*** A tip from Saint Robert Bellamine: Fasting is meritorious and very powerful in obtaining divine favours.
**** Bonus two tips from Giovanni della Casa: 1) Don't fall asleep or pull out a letter to read when in the pleasant company of others, thus demonstrating little appreciation of others and their conversation, and 2) Avoid proclaiming how greatly you are enjoying food and wine, for this habit is fit only for tavern keepers.
Image credits: 1: Rijksmuseum; 2: via Google: 3: via Pinterest; 4: Royal Collection Trust; 5-6: Flying With Hands; and 7: forgotten as I didn't write it down!
