Boiled Cider Pie

Thanksgiving is one of New England's great gifts to American culture. Originating in Puritan feast days, the holiday gradually spread across the country bringing turkey, stuffing and pies with it.

Modern Americans eat a wide variety of pies on Thanksgiving, many of them unrelated to the holiday's origins in New England. Let's face it, the Puritans weren't eating coconut cream or key lime pie, so a few years ago I wrote about the obscure pies of old New England, like squash pie, mincemeat pie, and boiled cider pie.

At the time I had never eaten or made a boiled cider pie, but this year in honor of Thanksgiving I decided to give it a try. I was really happy with the results.

Boiled cider is not something you see in many 21st century pantries. Its use has been recorded as early as the 1670s in western Massachusetts, and it was a common sweetener in the Colonial era. It makes sense. Molasses and sugar were expensive imports, but apple cider was locally produced and inexpensive. You can still buy boiled cider at country stores in northern New England and online from the King Arthur store, but I decided to make my own using instructions from an old Yankee Magazine cookbook.

It was easy, but took a long time. I poured a gallon of cider into a large pot, and then boiled it at high heat until it was reduced to a single cup of gelatinous goop. Even though I boiled it over high heat it still took around two and a half hours! I didn't need to stir it much until the end when it was really getting thick.

Boiling, boiling, boiling...

... Still boiling more than two hours later!

What I had after two hours and thirty minutes of boiling.

After it cooks down to a cup, let it cool. I put it in the refrigerator but I don't know if this was the smartest move. The boiled cider became almost completely solid which made it harder to use in the recipe. I would recommend letting it cool on the counter or maybe not boiling it down as much. The cider that is sold commercially is more syrupy and less goopy than what I made.

There are a few boiled cider pies floating around on the web, but I liked this one from Wood's Cider Mill in Vermont, which has been owned by the same family for seven generations. They make and sell boiled cider so I figured they must know what they're talking about. Also, their recipe is simple and really focuses on the boiled cider as the main ingredient. I baked the pie for an hour, which is 10 minutes longer than the recipe instructs, but that could just be my stove.

Sugar, eggs, milk, a little flour, and boiled cider. Mix it well because that boiled cider is thick!

It's looking a little  like pumpkin pie, but don't be fooled.

Boiled cider pie - sweet, tart, goopy and historic!

The pie came out great. Its consistency is similar to a custard or pumpkin pie, and although it's really sweet the sweetness is cut by the cider's tartness. If you like cider, sugar and pie crust (and who doesn't?) you will like this pie. It's like autumn, New England, and three centuries of history all in one dessert.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Bittersweet: Protection from Evil Magic

I don't know about where you live, but there is still some nice autumn color here in Boston. The leaves on the oaks in my neighborhood are tuning dark red, and the Norway maples are bright yellow.

I found this colorful viney shrub on a neighborhood perambulation. The plant is called bittersweet, and its branches are often used for autumn wreaths and centerpieces. Maybe you'll see some bittersweet adorning the place you eat your Thanksgiving dinner this year.

 
There are a few types of bittersweet, including an invasive species from Asia (which is what I found) and a species native to North America. According to the folklorist Clara Kern Bayliss, people in Vermont believed that the root of the bittersweet plant provided protection against evil witches and malevolent magic. However, certain conditions applied to collecting the root. You couldn't just go out and start digging.

Bayliss notes that a doctor in Shaftsbury would go with his wife and daughter on a certain day of the year to collect bittersweet root to ward off witches. The doctor and his family would not talk, or look from side to side, from the moment they left their house until they returned.

Unfortunately Bayliss doesn't indicate on what day of the year they would collect the root. Was it the same day every year, or did it change depending on the weather or other criteria? I'd love to know.

It's not surprising they gathered the plant in silence. Silence is an important ingredient in some folk magic, and speaking often breaks a spell. For example, you can control a witch with their own witch bridle if you throw it over their head, but they will be freed as soon as you speak a word. Somehow silence was important to maintain the efficacy of the bittersweet.

There is a third plant sometimes called bittersweet, the bittersweet nightshade. This is a weedy invasive import from Europe with poisonous berries and toxic leaves. Leave this one alone!

Special note to my Wiccan and witchy readers: New Englanders wanted protection from witches who practiced maleficium, or harmful magic. Other than the very religious, most people didn't shun magic or fortune-telling. I don't want anyone to get offended by all this negative talk about witches!

I got my information from Clara Kern Bayliss's 1908 article, "Witchcraft", which appeared in The Journal of American Folklore.

Bigfoot: He's Wicked Strong!

I was a big comic book fan when I was a kid, and one activity most young comic geeks engage in is determining which superhero is stronger. Can the Incredible Hulk beat up the Mighty Thor? Who can lift the heavier weight, Superman or Captain Marvel? A quick search of the Internet will show you that adult comic book fans still play this same game.

The Hulk, who gets his strength from gamma radiation, usually tops the list of the strongest superheros. A lot of other superheroes and villains in Marvel Comics get their power from gamma radiation, like She-Hulk, the Abomination, and Doc Samson.

One under-appreciated gamma powered hero, though, is Sasquatch. Sasquatch was originally a Canadian physicist named Walter Langowski. While playing around with gamma radiation (as physicists so often do in the comics), Walter gained the ability to transform into a giant, orange-furred musclebound monster who looks just like the cryptid Bigfoot. Assuming the name Sasquatch, Walter uses his super strength to fight crime with a band of other Canadian heroes called Alpha Flight.

Unfortunately, not even gamma radiation could make Sasquatch an A-list superhero like the Hulk, and I don't think he's appearing in any comic books currently. Much like the real-life Sasquatch, the comic-book version is now quite elusive.

But that's not the only trait they share. Like Walter Langowski, the real-life Sasquatch or Bigfoot is also fantastically strong, as this example from Joseph Citro's Weird New England shows.

Bigfoot has been seen quite a few times in a Longmeadow, Massachusetts area called the Meadows. The Meadows abuts the Connecticut River, and many locals have seen large hairy humanoids swimming in its waters. Others have seen hairy faces peering into their windows at night, and found footprints leading from their houses down to the river the following day. Some residents speculate that the creatures inhabit a series of tunnels that run under the riverbanks.

The Meadows. Photo from this site.

A man named Joe operated a car crushing business in the Meadows for many years. One summer night he and some friends were sitting outside the office trailer enjoying some beer when they heard something moving through the bushes by the river bank. Abruptly, a large man burst into the car crushing yard. But was it a man? Although his bearded face looked human, he was eight-feet tall, naked, and covered with hair. It was a Bigfoot.

The Bigfoot wandered around yard for a while before picking up a crushed car chassis. Joe and his friends gasped! The crushed car weighed more than 2,000 pounds. The Bigfoot eventually put it back down and walked back to the river, where he swam away into the night. The next day Joe shut down his business and found a new location in town.

The Bigfoot seen in the Meadows was not a gamma-radiated anomaly - many people who see Bigfoots claim they are very strong. For example, in his book Passing Strange Joseph Citro mentions a 1951 Bigfoot encounter in Sudbury, Vermont where a Bigfoot moved a 450 pound oil drum.

To sum up, don't mess with Bigfoot because he's wicked strong - and he's not confined to the comic books.

Halloween Suprise Unearthed by Hurricane Sandy

When hurricane Sandy tore through New England it caused quite a bit of damage, knocking out power, flooding coastal communities, and uprooting trees. But when a tree on New Haven's historic town green blew over, it revealed a special surprise.

New Haven resident Katie Carbo was out on the green inspecting the storm damage with some neighbors when she noticed something in the roots of a large uprooted oak tree. At first she thought it was a rock, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a human skeleton. Yikes!

Photo from the New Haven Register.

The police arrived and determined that the skeleton was female and hundreds of years old. New Haven's town green used to be a cemetery before it became a park in 1821, and a police spokesman said the skeleton was probably from a Colonial era burial.

Apparently, all the grave stones were moved to a newer cemetery in 1821, but the bodies were left buried. An estimated 5,000 bodies are still buried under the green. Yikes again! Don't let your dog dig around in that park.

Special thanks to Leigh Marble for emailing me about this story! I found the details in the New Haven Register, the Rock Hill Herald, and the Hartford Courant.

Mirror Magic for Halloween

Halloween wasn't really celebrated in New England until the 19th century. The Puritans frowned on most holidays although they and their descendants did celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, which has some similarities with Halloween like costumes and people roaming around begging for things.

Unlike Halloween Guy Fawkes Day doesn't have a supernatural component. No witches, ghosts or monsters, just raucous excess and drunken revelry. But when large numbers of Irish and Scottish immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the 19th century they brought Halloween and its supernatural practices with them. These Halloween practices spread across the country, through both immigrant social networks and magazines and newspapers. Eventually Halloween magic became part of the nation's regional folklore, including New England's.

Most modern Americans associate Halloween with scary things, but a lot of the older folklore deals with love magic and love divination. Here's a nice example I found in Eva Speare's New Hampshire Folk Tales.

On Halloween night, an unmarried man or woman should hold a mirror and walk down the cellar steps backwards. As they walk down the steps, they should repeat:

Whoever my true love is to be
Come and look in this glass with me.

A person's face will appear in the mirror, looking over the unmarried person's shoulder. This will be the person they will marry. However, if a coffin appears in the mirror the unmarried person will die. (Hmm. I guess even the love magic can be a little scary, and walking down the stairs backwards sounds dangerous.)

Watch your step with that mirror...

There once was a young man who was very sick with tuberculosis. Despite being weak from his illness, he walked down backwards into the cellar while looking into a mirror on Halloween night. His family heard a crash, and rushed down to find him collapsed on the dirt floor.

When he revived, the young man said, "Don't worry! I did not see a coffin, but instead saw a pretty young girl in a blue dress. I will live and marry her."

The prediction came true. He recovered and went on to become a school teacher in Maine. While he was there he met a pretty young woman who looked exactly like the girl he had seen in the mirror. Upon talking with her, he discovered that she had once owned a blue dress exactly like he had seen in the mirror that Halloween night. The two fell in love, got married, and lived long happy lives.

Happy Halloween everyone!