vintage

Treats

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today Kim and I are venturing off to the fall edition of the vintage postcard show down in the West Village so I hope to have a new stock of interesting bits to share. I hope to stop at the spice store I highlighted on a trip earlier this year (in a post about Washington Square Park here). If I make it there today my goal would be to buy some curry and related spices.

I have a whim to explore more entirely vegetarian recipes (less fish) and am curious to see what I can add to my arsenal. For those of you who follow that particular line of thought here at Pictorama I hope to share some recipes in the future. Tomorrow’s cooking adventure will be root vegetable stew topped with Bisquick dumplings. Last week was a pretty fair chickpea stew. It was filling but I suspect that the root veggies plus dumplings will be more so.

However, today’s topic is treats and while I will get to today’s tin in a moment, treats were just a topic in the apartment earlier. Yesterday I was lucky to have a chance to see Temple Grandin give a talk at work. (For those who don’t know her, she is a remarkable animal behaviorist who is also significantly autistic. She has written about both, but was addressing some of our vet techs at a conference I got to sneak into.)

Temple shared many thoughts about living with animals, largely focused on training them (both domestic and farm animals) to be less fearful. Much of the root of that seems to be treats! Associate new things with something good like treats – when introducing a new place or person, teaching them to be handled, etc. So today I am eyeing the cats and the Churu and wondering what inroads in behavior we might make.

Found this online and wish it wasn’t cut off but who could resist, Hail to the Toffee King?

Back to today’s tin which came to me in a big haul in NJ this past summer. It held Mackintosh’s British candy. Their candy appears to have been toffee. I have a big soft spot for toffee – not a huge dessert eater but when I see salted toffee something I lose all control and quite simply must have it. I like it on its own too, although not sure my dentist would be pleased to know this and luckily it doesn’t get put to the test that often.

This for sale on eBay at the time of publication. Clearly from a period when they were producing toffee in New York.

Mackintosh candy was founded by a husband and wife team in Yorkshire, England. They established it the year they married and while he continued to work a factory job she ran the shop. Violet, who had worked for a confectioner previously, must have done a good job because it grew like topsy. In fact, it was their product which changed the toffee from a generic for sweet to the chewy delight we think of today. John set out with an advertising campaign declaring himself, The King of All Toffee.

Expansion took place over time, first a warehouse and then a larger one. However, notably, in 1909 they opened their first overseas factory in Asbury Park, New Jersey of all places. It must have seemed like a good bet with the amusement pier there. (Is my tin one that kicked around from that nascent New Jersey period? It says Made in England so likely not.) Sadly the venture failed however. Not that this kept them down for long and the company continued to grow (with setback during World Wars, fires, etc.) and eventually merged with Rowntree in 1969 and exists in that form today.

The Asbury Park of the day they would have emerged into.

Meanwhile their tins proliferated and many are available. A quick search doesn’t turn up this particular one, but dogs were frequently on the tins which as useful items were saved. (This seemed to be part of their advertising strategy overall.) I purchased this one for the cheerful dog because readers know that I lead a pretty doggy existence for someone who is mom to seven cats! My thought is to take this fellow to work and keep some of the errant bits and pieces on my desk in it.

According to a Wikipedia entry about the candy today: The toffee is now sold in bags containing a random assortment of individual wrapped flavoured toffees. The flavours are (followed by wrapping colour): Malt (Blue), Harrogate (Yellow), Mint (Green), Egg & Cream (Orange), Coconut (Pink), and Toffee (Maroon). The maroon-wrapped toffees do not display a flavour on the wrapper. The product’s subtitle is “Toffee De Luxe” and its motto is “a tradition worth sharing” Egg & Cream?

Hopefully more tomorrow from the postcard show. Wish me luck!

Love-ly Lamp

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I think Pictorama readers know by now that I am very susceptible to stumbling on something while scrolling through the internet, eBay and Instagram in particular. I see a heck of a lot and, if you think of it in proportion to what I see I inquire about a small amount and purchase and even smaller amount – although it does pile up. Anyway, this lamp popped out at me while casually strolling through Instagram and I went so far as to purchase it for the house in Jersey. It came to us via Mike Zohn @obscuraantiques whose antique store on the we used to visit on the Lower Eastside before his relocation to points south of here.

Pictorama readers might also remember that I have a soft spot for lamps and have posted about a number of them purchased for the house here and a few for the apartment in New York. (I was thinking about this the other day and remembering that for my father it was clocks and chairs. Man, my father would go way out of his way if he thought an antique clock might be in the offing. When he was a bit younger he was also that way about antique chairs – I grew up with an extraordinary number of chairs in the house – many were Shaker in origin. We could have seated small concerts or film viewing. They were like cat nip to him. Meanwhile, some of those past lamp posts can be found here and here.)

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that this lamp would look nice and be useful in our bathroom – I am not a huge fan of the overhead light. I was assured that it had been rewired and all I would need is a shade and the hardware for the shade however when it arrived the thingy where the bulb goes looked awfully gnawed away. It took a number of months before I could get it to the hardware store here which is a splendid place to get work done on lamps.

Fair Haven hardware is one of those rare thriving businesses that manages to look (and smell) both contemporary while remaining steeped in its longstanding past. Fair Haven Hardware is 72 years young this year and while it was sold by the son of the original owner to a employee a few years ago, he’s pledged to keep it going for the next 70 years. (I recently got on my elevator in Manhattan and was talking to a neighbor who used to have a home down here, when she talked about selling she said the thing she’d miss most was this great hardware store in Fair Haven!) Their 70th anniversary banner still hangs on the front of the shop.

Kim and I were trying to analyze what the smell is. It is reminiscent of an aging Woolworth’s or ancient five and dime of that variety with perhaps a bit more fertilizer and grass seed thrown in. You might say dust but it isn’t dusty, nor is it dark, quite well lit really.

Anyway, they replaced the bit that holds the bulb and now I just need the hardware for the shade and a shade. While it isn’t exactly light, it is not as heavy as it might look. It’s sort of a dotty design and the ageing patina improves its appearance I think. I continue to think it might have a place in the bathroom. (Although I recently purchased a night light for it and it seems a tad less pressing than it did.)

Buying a shade for a lamp online is a bit difficult and this has prevented me from purchasing one for Popeye as well. You have a desire to see how various shades look. I need to find a local store where I can take them and pop a few on, like trying on hats. Or I can gird my loins, order online and take my chances. I’ll let you know what I decide.

Holiday: Part One, the Train

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Like many folks somehow holiday activities here in Manhattan generally makes us burrow deeper in our apartments until all the fuss has passed rather than summoning us out. Accidentally finding yourself on the subway during Santa Con (the annual drunken Santa clad citywide pub crawl) is enough to send you screaming back to your apartment until well into the New Year.

While there was a time when I braved the crowds cheerfully to see the Thanksgiving Day balloons blown up on Central Park West, now I time a trip to New Jersey to be ensconced there the night before. (However some readers know that this year Blackie blew that plan up and I traveled back to New York on the Wednesday afternoon to take him to the kitty ER at work that evening. He is better and I ultimately I braved Penn Station and the parade again and returned to New Jersey to cook there. That post can be found here.)

For all of that, on a whim last weekend and knowing that Kim and I had a plan to head downtown for some shopping I needed to do, I decided that we would hop the Holiday Nostalgia train on Sunday as our mode of transportation. Sponsored by the Transit Museum in conjunction with the MTA, restored early subway cars are put back into commission on Sundays throughout December. This year the trains ran along a variation on the Q and F lines, starting up here on 96th Street and making our 86th Street and other UES stops before swinging east and taking us right to our destination near the Bowery.

Pro photo of another car empty.

Even at the second stop, ours, the train was already packed. (I guess the serious folks went up to 96th and got on there.) We squeezed in amongst people in period dress and a variety of Santa related and wildly festive costumes, as well as some other folks like us. I don’t know what I expected, but I was a bit disappointed at first because the crowd made some of the details of the train car harder to see. However, during the course of the ride we were pretty much able to take in everything, from the rattan seats to the period advertising reproduced for the occasion.

Vintage ads.

It was immediately apparent that the ride of the train felt very different – sort of the difference between a wooden rollercoaster and a modern one if you know what I mean. An old-fashioned paddle fan whirled away in the ceiling and the only ventilation were openings in the roof and the open door at the end of the car, at least in our case it was open. Incandescent light bulbs which you could have unscrewed while standing there lit it. Most notable though was the smell of the train – you could smell the diesel! We agreed, it smelled old.

Looking into the car ahead of ours.

At one point a man who clearly knew a thing or two about the history of the subway was standing next to me and explained that although the cars needed to be similar enough to be run together, every one was slightly different. (This made me a bit sorry it was too crowded to hop from car to car and see each.) I peered into the next car which did look somewhat different. According to a notice near the ceiling, our car was built in 1932. He also told me that the train would travel through some currently unused tunnels, allowing us to take our unusual route.

This kid took it upon himself to announce each stop as you would hear on a modern train – with all the special stops all correct though. Here he’s chatting with a couple who were visiting from Britain.

Soon enough our stop, the next to last for the train, came up and we hopped off. More of our adventure tomorrow. (What’s more there’s a rumor I might pinch hit as Santa for dog photos this coming week, so lots of festive fun here at Deitch Studio!)