I was the youngest child, and "helped" choose the house. At least I was taken along on the house hunt adventure. I really liked a red house that was dollhouse-tiny, with dozens of other red, dollhouse-tiny outbuildings. It had a rope swing. I still remember that house, from a short visit in 1976, although I don't think I ever saw it again, and have no certainty of where it was located.
The weight of my favor rested lightly on my mother's shoulders, so we instead purchased a house on a hillside that featured mysterious tall pines that had their own wheezy conversations, and lichen splotched rocks that pushed out of the earth like crashed spaceships. Best of all, it had a river, so I had a friend. Although I'm sure these features also appealed to her, she liked the location and the potential of the place. We moved in and called it "Puckihuddle".
I don't have an actual definition for the word, Puckihuddle. A somewhat thorough search of the oracle of Google shows a preschool by the name, and a reference in the Great Bend Tribune newspaper of Kansas, March 25, 1975 of "Puckihuddle" being chosen for a unit name in a Lutheran Holy Week program. Also, there was a store by the name that placed an advertisement in the Ulster County Catskill Mountain News on November 9, 1972 in the great build up to Christmas that asserted that "Santa comes to Puckihuddle for"....such intriguing items as patchwork elephants, feathered vests and the enthralling enigma; "Plumnutty". If I could just go back to Christmas 1972. Did I get a Plumnutty and just don't recall? I think I certainly would remember a feathered vest. It appears both Plumnutty and Puckihuddle went out of vogue in the 1970s, as there were no more modern references.
My mother said "Puckihuddle" was an Native American word (I'm sure she said "Indian", as it was 1976) that meant "A happy place to live and work". I've long been suspicious that she picked the meaning and then the word. Because live and work there, we did. A search of a database of dozens of Native American languages is missing the word.
So, we moved into Puckihuddle, it was our homeplace.
Puckihuddle possessed layers of life.
According to a stranger that came down the drive one day, the mysterious whispering tall pines were a beacon to the child he was during WWII- where their family planned to meet if they were ever separated by war.
One year, best pal Tommy and I, stumbled- literally, over stones in the myrtle that turned out to be stairs from the house down to the Little River. We showed mother and dad, and they were revived for delightful use and mom planted daffodils all down the hill through the wood so that using the steps in early spring was covered by a canopy of trees spurting yellow-green buds and carpeted by purple myrtle and yellow daffs.
There was a foundation of stone that used to hold up ____ice house? barn? root cellar? that now grew a small sample of Marsh Marigold whose bloom my mother treasured, and would call us to come look, expecting our equal awe.
On the property was a little garage that, first priority upon purchase, was turned into a barn to house my sister's horse, Frosty. In that garage was a small treasure trove of things. Kitchen-y things that were grand, and crude and special and exotic. In the landscape of 70's cuisine, Pyrex and Tupperware, these were things I'd never before seen. My mother said they had belonged to Clementine Paddleford. That Clementine Paddleford had lived in the house a long time ago, and she was the first female food editor for the New York Times. (Or so my 8 year old brain retained.)
Clementine Paddleford always hung around the edges of my imagination. She was eternally the full, rich, lovely name of "Clementine Paddleford", never another version. The steps we discovered to the Little River were probably made by Clementine Paddleford and her servants to fetch water. The beams of the small study with the soaring ceiling surely once had a loft where Clementine Paddleford slept. And, undoubtedly, she cooked over the stone fireplace in the dining room with a large cast iron pot.
I have no idea why in my imagination, she lived in a loft but had water-fetching servants and cooked on a open fire. My Clementine Paddleford wore a long calico dress with high collar trimmed in lace, and a bun. She was rich, but cooked on open fire. And, she was a newspaper woman. Revered, but long forgotten, having tragically left behind her kitchen accoutrements. Clementine Paddleford was a cross between Ma Ingalls and Susan B. Anthony.
Sometimes, I would try to figure out the purpose of the more unusual kitchen-y things left behind by the esteemed Clementine Paddleford. Mostly I was wrong. But sometimes I would be let in on the true identity of an item by an older, wiser cuisinier. I guessed for eons what a little iron press with intricate design and two sides hinged together could create. I was eventually informed it was an ice cream cone press with a wooden mold to wrap the warm cooked cone around so it could cool in the proper shape. Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Cones came from the store in a box, right? There were mixers, mashers, strainers, mallets, beaters, all of odd shapes and sizes that made the art of cooking seem difficult and potentially violent.
The 80's came, I grew up, Puckihuddle became someone else's homeplace. And another layer added to it's history. Clementine Paddleford took a step back in the mists of time, but her collection lived on, at least in the wooden spoons I took with me to college and in each move since.
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| The wooden spoons- with a regular spoon to compare. |
So, imagine my neck snapping around as I ran my bathtub water on Sunday and spotted out of the corner of my eye, nearly buried in the spine of my favorite magazine, Country Living, the words "Clementine Paddleford".
It was as if after 40 years, bubbling forth, there was proof of her existence outside of the kitchen treasures and the stone steps to the river. I greedily read the small blurb that included this name from my past.
It read;
" In the case of fire, after safeguarding my family, I'd run back for my vintage copy of How America Eats by Clementine Paddleford. My husband picked it up, almost as an afterthought, from a used bookstore while on a business trip in 2000. When I cracked its spine, I discovered a kindred spirit- a woman who, as food editor of the New York Herald Tribune for 30 years, had traveled thousands of miles to answer the book's titular question. It was the first time I'd read a food writer who paid as much attention to the stories behind the recipes as to the recipes themselves. I set my mind to learning everything I could about the author, and went on to write her biography, helping to reinstate her name into the annals of American food history. (She, in turn, helped shape my career as a food writer.) And all of this came from a husband's hurried $14 purchase. (Good thing it wasn't jewelry.)"
Well. I was like a beagle who caught wind of a rabbit. A beagle who was in the bathtub. But had access to Google. Good thing my cell phone has a water proof cover!
My main question was "Did Clementine Paddleford really live at Puckihuddle?"
My research belied my childhood persona of Clementine Paddleford, and replaced her with someone even more excellent. She was an adventurer and a pioneer, but of the 1940's and 50's, instead of my imagined 1800 model. I guess that tells you what my childhood brain thought of the timeline of when the first female food editor would have been hired. She wrote her seminal book in 1960. She flew her own little Piper Cub plane, spent time on a submarine cataloging the food made under the water, travelled the country learning about tacos and oysters, sticky buns and rum pie. At age 33, she had surgery for cancer that left her with a permanent laryngostomy, but didn't stop working, learning and writing. Also, evidently, not only did she not cook over an open fire in a cast iron kettle, she didn't cook much at all. She had two maids that did that for her (and, therefore, potentially used those stone steps to fetch water from the river? Okay, wrong century again.) I read and read and read, and learned a whole lot about Clementine Paddleford. And then, buried in a bio on cooksinfo.com was the following sentence; "In 1938, she purchased a summer home on 17 acres in Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut. "
Good enough for me.
I believe.
Clementine Paddleford was real! She lived at Puckihuddle before it was ours and probably truly left behind her wooden spoons and ice cream cone creating capacity. When I stir my chili, she stirs with me.
And, as another truth becomes evident, I would guess that the Native Language data base is missing a word. My mother knows it.
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