The Henry Ford Apple Kraut
Serves 6

Bacon – diced small, ½ cup
Spanish onions – julienne, 1 cup
Stout beer – ¼ cup
Apple cider – ¼ cup
Apple cider vinegar – 2 tablespoons
Apples (medium size) – peeled, cored and diced, 2 cups
Caraway seed – 1 teaspoon
Black pepper – 1 tablespoon
Horseradish – 2 tablespoons
Sauerkraut with juice – 6 cups
Brown sugar – ¼ cup

1. Render the bacon until crisp
2. Add onions and caramelize in the bacon fat
3. Add the remaining ingredients, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes
4. Serve hot with sausage or roast pork

Well, ask no more, my friend; Greenfield Village cyclist Jim O’Hagan will put your mind at rest.

These unique bicycles, properly known as “ordinary bikes” (although “ordinary” by whose standards?), came about around the turn of the century and were a luxury item to most.

So sit back and watch this video as Jim explains and then demonstrates how to ride these unique bicycles…and if you want to see them in person, hurry out to Greenfield Village – the summer season with all its old-fashioned games on the green, period-clothed strollers and ordinary bicyclists ends this Sunday, August 22!

This Sunday, our newly restored 1965 Indy 500 winner, the Lotus-Ford 38/1, will be on display at the 2010 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. But first, the Lotus-Ford had a very special unveiling ceremony this morning at Club XIX at The Lodge at Pebble Beach. The Henry Ford hosted guests and media to breakfast and a press conference right outside the Club.

Our Lotus-Ford shared the stage with another significant racing achievement, unveiling of the 2011 100^th Anniversary logo of the Indianapolis 500. (Yes, 100 glorious years of the famed Indy 500!) Vice President of The Henry Ford, Christian Overland, introduced 3-time, Indy 500 winner Bobby Unser to reminisce about the Indy 500, the Lotus-Ford and Dan Gurney, who brought together Lotus and Ford Motor Company to create the Lotus-Ford 38/1.

Simultaneously as the Lotus-Ford was unveiled by Christian Overland, Edsel B. Ford II, Automotive Curator Bob Casey and Dan Gurney and Indy logo by Bobby Unser, Johnny Rutherford – another 3-time, Indianapolis 500 winner – also unveiled the 100^th Anniversary Indy 500 logo at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

(To watch the (recorded) simulcast from Pebble Beach and Indy Speedway, visit the Racing in America website – http://www.racinginamerica.com/content/newly-restored-1965-lotus-ford-381-makes-its-north-american-premiere-pebble-beach-concours-d)

Also on Sunday, the Racing in America name has one of the greatest opportunities in NASCAR – our name and logo on a NASCAR stock car! Yes, right on top of the hood, side panels and back bumper will be Racing in America Henry Ford Museum. It will be on the #19 Richard Petty Motorsports Ford Fusion driven by Elliott Sadler. As it drives around the 2 mile track at Michigan International Speedway, MILLIONS of viewers on ESPN and the thousands in the stands will get to see that logo race by. How cool! We’re very grateful for this partnership between Richard Petty Motorsports, Ford Racing and The Henry Ford!

Here are a few photos of the car at MIS from the Racing in America Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/RacinginAmerica#!/album.php?aid=30144&id=119911758026203&ref=mf Also, while you’re there, become a Fan! We update the page daily and you’ll get the inside scoop on this great exhibition.)

Make sure to check out the MIS race on ESPN on Sunday (Pre-race starts about 1:00 or 1:30 p.m.) and check out the Racing in America Facebook page for updates on the NASCAR race and also Pebble Beach!

See you at the finish line!

About Racing in America:

Racing in America will be a 22,000-square-foot exhibition covering all forms of American auto racing, including stock cars, open wheel cars, sports cars, drag-racing vehicles, winged sprinters and land-speed-record cars. It will bring the story of American auto racing to life—its excitement, speed and spectacle; its challenges, its people and the ways it inspires innovation. History’s greatest and most significant racing vehicles will be featured, as well as technological advancements in the sport – from speed to safety to pit crew choreography.

Spicy Chow (canned version)
(Needs one week prep before serving)

Chow
Green cabbage shredded fine, 2 cups
Banana pepper, seeded and minced, 3 each
Jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced, 3 each
Red bell pepper, seeded and minced, 1 each
Yellow onions, minced fine, 1 cup
Sweet corn cut from the cob, 2 cups

Brine
Sea salt, 1 tablespoon
Low acid vinegar, 2 cups
Sugar, 4 tablespoons
Turmeric, 2 tablespoon
Celery seed, 2 teaspoons
Mustard seed, 2 teaspoons

1. Combine all ingredients for the chow, season with salt, pack into 2 hot, sterilized pint wide-mouth mason jars
2. Combine remaining brine ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil. Pour hot brine into the mason jars and clean jar rims
3. Close lids securely. In a low boil, submerge jars in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. Remove from water and let rest at room temperature.
4. Allow to set one week before using

Chicken
Heirloom chicken about 3 pounds, 1 each

Marinade
Fresh Basil leaves, 1 cup
Fresh Parsley leaves, ¼ cup
Fresh Oregano leaves, ¼ cup
Garlic cloves 4 each
Whole grain mustard, ½ cup
Dijon mustard, ½ cup
Red wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons
Olive oil, ½ cup
Sea salt
Black Pepper

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor. Mix until pureed.
2. Pour marinade over chicken, season with sea salt and black pepper and marinate overnight in the refrigerator.
3. Roast chicken on a slow grill with a lid for about an hour, turning frequently until an internal temperature of 165F is reached.
4. Allow to rest for ten minutes after cooking, then cut into quarters
5. Serve with the spicy chow

“People can say what they like about rag-time. The Waltz is beautiful, the Tango is graceful, the Brazilian Maxixe is unique. One can sit quietly and listen with pleasure to them all; but when a good orchestra plays a ‘rag’ one has simply got to move.” – from Modern Dancing by Mr. & Mrs. Vernon Castle, 1914

This weekend, join our costumed presenters for a spin on the dance floor during Ragtime Street Fair.

As I walked up the main stairway of Lovett Hall into the Grand Ballroom, I could feel the pulse of dancing feet above. Nearly 50 members of The Henry Ford’s staff joined Nira Pullin, movement coach and musical theater choreographer at Wayne State University, for an evening of ragtime dance lessons in preparation for the fourth annual Ragtime Street Fair, held this weekend, July 24-25 in Greenfield Village.

Pullin taught them the basics of the most popular dance of ragtime – the One Step – so that they can teach our visitors as well during the event. This simple and popular dance requires each participant to take only one step to each count of the music, making it easy to stay in time with the tune.

Deemed as America’s original popular music, ragtime music can be described as having an uneven or ragged rhythm. Musicians such as Scott Joplin and Charles L. Johnson integrated European music with syncopated African and Latin American rhythms to create a unique sound that became popular in the 1890s and paved the way for music of the swing and rock & roll eras.

Now that you know your history, click on the link here to watch a video teaching the One Step – then join us this weekend at Ragtime Street Fair and show off your fancy footwork!

Richard Jeryan is a volunteer in Greenfield Village and is dedicated to the Weaving Shop and its Team. Here’s an article from Handwoven Magazine from May/June 2008 about Richard and how he helped restore the Jacquard Loom in Liberty Craftworks.

Handwoven Magazine May/June 2008 Issue
An Industrialist and His Looms

Henry Ford couldn’t have foreseen how saving his boyhood home from being demolished would lead to the establishment of one of the largest living history museums in the country. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, started collecting America’s past. Starting with some McGuffey Readers, his collection soon grew. In 191, he saved the family home from being demolished by a road expansion, thus performing his first act of historic preservation, an act he would play out in earnest ten years later by establishing what would become The Henry Ford.

Jeanine Head Miller, Curator of Domestic Life at The Henry Ford, notes that “Ford collected the tools and buildings that represented the way of life he had known as a child – a way of life that had been dramatically changed by industrial innovation, including Ford’s own invention of the Model T. He collected broadly and deeply. For instance, Ford didn’t acquire just a few pieces of textile equipment, but hundreds.”

Today, Greenfield Village is spread out over more than 90 acres that are divided into seven districts. As an industrialist, Ford was intrigued by the efficiencies of mass production, but he also valued the craftsmanship involved in producing everyday goods, from cars to the flour used to bake the family bread. Greenfield Village pays homage to early American manufacturing in the Liberty Craftworks district by preserving old mills and offering demonstrations by skilled artisans weaving, potting and blowing glass.

Ford’s Loom
In the late 1920s, Ford established a private, tuition-free school on the grounds of the museum and village to educate youth based on his creed of “learning by doing.” The children were encouraged to use the equipment in the village and try their hands at a wide range of crafts from woodworking to weaving. In 1934, a timber-framed loom with a jacquard head was built to sit among the many others that were brought to the village. It is this Loom that caught Richard Jeryan’s eye.

Richard Jeryan spent his career at Ford motor Company as an engineer researching the use of structural fiber-reinforced composites. At the most basic level, these are the fabrics woven of glass, carbon, or Kevlar fiber and impregnated with plastic resin to create stiff material from which, among other things, cars can be made. Jeryan’s mother was a seamstress and his father a metal fabricator. He grew up with a respect fro materials and the means of making them into useful objects. In 1980, drawn to the mechanical nature of the loom and skill involved in making cloth, Jeryan learned to weave, which eventually lead him to volunteer at Greenfield Village.

In 2006, Jeryan, along with fellow volunteer Tim Brewer, set about restoring the Jacquard loom that had sat unused for years. Piece by piece, Jeryan and Brewer disassembled the head and researched the technology of antique looms. The loom will be in action weaving a blue-and-white sampler featuring a pattern from a mid-nineteenth century Indiana doubleweave coverlet called Frenchman’s Fancy of the million-and-a-half visitors expected to tour the Village in 2008.

Here are some other interesting facts:

• The Jacquard loom was patented in 1803.
• Our loom is one of only two operational Jacquard hand looms in public museums in the U.S.
• It can weave figured and fancy fabrics like coverlets, damask, paisley shaws and ornate labels for clothing.
• The Jacquard loom revolutionized weaving and cloth production in 1803 – these looms are still used every day, but they’re now computer-driven power looms.
• The loom use punch cards to create the designs – these cards were the inspiration for IBM’s computer punch cards/beginning of digital storage data.

“Henry Ford’s Complicated Relationship with Agriculture (and agrarian life).”

Exhibit A:   Progress Through Industrialization!

Farm Progress (1924)

Exhibit B:  Down on Ye Olde Farme.

Clara Ford in Costume at a Ford Farm (1926)

Discuss.

In this celebration at Greenfield Village, approximately 250 children participate in versions of traditional May Day festivities. Some children carry arches of flowers, some are in costume, some are part of the queen’s court. We witness the crowning of the Queen of the May. Various old-fashioned dances are performed for the queen and her court, as taught by dance instructor and head of Greenfield Village Schools, Benjamin Lovett. (My favorite is the Jockey Dance!) Dances are also performed around a Maypole, and all participants take part in dancing the quadrille. The film closes with older children dancing in the Lovett Hall ballroom and an aerial view of Greenfield Village.

Noting that the festival was May 24, this archivist was somewhat surprised at finding it not uncommon for May Festivals to be held later in May, rather than on May Day, May 1 (having nothing more to go on than vague memories of elementary school Maypole dances–not to mention different connotations of the day, such as observances for the Labor movement and disaster preparedness for libraries, archives, and museums). Presumably this timeframe was built around when the weather got nicer in northern climes? Or perhaps it was the influence of the Dutch and later African American observances of Pinkster celebrated in late May or early June, some of which included Maypoles, and which, though tied linguistically to the church year–Pinkster deriving from the Dutch for “Pentecost”–were quite obviously also linked to the seasons and growing conditions. On the other hand, May Day and May Festival observances in Europe seem not to have been rigidly fixed to May 1. Did they party the whole month long? Sometimes they did, it would seem (with a translation into modern English courtesy of Wikipedia), or perhaps mixed and merged practices with other similar festivals.

Although the upcoming Memorial Day is a time of reverent, even somber, remembrance for many, let us also look to the joys of spring and warmer weather.

Growing Great Gardens

Cooking with Herbs – Rubs, Marinades, Dressings, Sauces

Executive Chef Nick Seccia, CEC

I recently presented a cooking class at a gardening conference about cooking with fresh herbs. Herbs are easy to grow from readily available seedlings that you can get at any local farmer’s market. Whether being planted in pots or in the ground, herbs are easily maintained as long as they are watered frequently.

We grow herbs such as basil, thyme, chives, rosemary, sage, oregano, cilantro and parsley during the summer in large containers. We plant the seedlings in light, well drained soil and always after Mother’s Day to avoid any frost damage. We then use the herbs all summer long in our kitchens at The Henry Ford.

Fresh herbs can also be used in the winter months by drying the fresh leaves and storing them for later use or by processing them and then freezing. To dry the herbs, hang whole plants upside down until dry. The recipes listed below are simple and can be used in a variety of dishes with commonly found herbs – hopefully from your own garden!

Herb Marinade
1 pint
1 cup – virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons – dijon mustard
2 tablespoons – red wine vinegar
4 cloves – garlic
2 tablespoons – fresh rosemary
¼ cup – fresh parsley
¼ cup – fresh basil
2 tablespoons – fresh oregano

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender
2. Blend well

Pesto
1 pint
3 cups – basil leaves, packed tight
4 cloves – garlic
2 tablespoons –pine nuts, toasted
3 tablespoons – parmesan cheese
½ cup – olive oil

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender, except the oil
2. While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Cilantro Peanut Pesto
1 pint
2 cups – cilantro leaves, packed tightly
1 cup – parsley, packed tightly
¼ cup – salted peanuts
2 tablespoons – chili powder, toasted
4 cloves – garlic
½ cup – olive oil
Juice from 1 lemon

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender, except the oil
2. While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Raspberry Honey Tarragon Vinaigrette
1 pint
½ cup – fresh raspberries
2 tablespoons – honey
¼ cup – raspberry vinegar
2 tablespoons – fresh tarragon leaves
1 cup – vegetable oil
1. Combine all ingredients in a blender, except the oil
2. While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Roasted Garlic Balsamic Basil Vinaigrette
1 pint
1 head – roasted garlic
½ cup – balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons – granulated sugar
1 ½ cups – virgin olive oil
1 cup – basil leaves, packed tightly
Juice 1 lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Squeeze roasted garlic from the head into a blender
2. Combine with all ingredients, except oil
3. While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Apple Lemon Thyme Dressing
1 pint
3 each – apples, peeled, cored and diced
3 tablespoons – honey
3 tablespoons – fresh lemon thyme leaves
½ cup – apple cider vinegar
1 cup – vegetable oil

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender, except the oil

2.   While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Ginger Lemongrass Dressing
1 pint
½ cup – rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons –fresh ginger, peeled and minced fine
1 tablespoon – fresh garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons – scallion, minced
2 tablespoons – cilantro leaves, minced fine
2 tablespoons – lemongrass, minced fine
2 tablespoon – granulated sugar
¼ cup – peanut butter
Sesame oil 1 cup
1. Combine all ingredients in a blender, except the oil
2. While blending, add oil slowly until smooth

Herb Mayonnaise
1 pint
2 each – egg yolks
1 tablespoon – white balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon – water
1 teaspoon – dry mustard
1 tablespoon – dijon mustard
2 cups – vegetable table oil
Salt to taste
White pepper to taste
Juice from ½ lemon
2 tablespoon – chervil
2 tablespoon – chives
½ cup – parsley leaves, chopped fine
Thyme leaves 2 tablespoons

1. Combine yolks, vinegar, water, dry mustard, and dijon mustard and blend until light yellow and frothy slowly add oil until fully incorporated
2. Rinse chopped parsley with a small bit of water and squeeze thru cheesecloth into the mayonnaise, add the remaining herbs and blend until incorporated season with salt and pepper

Chimichurri
1 pint
2 cups – parsley, packed tight
1 cup – oregano, packed tight
½ cup – olive oil
½ cup – red wine vinegar
½ each – yellow onion
2 cloves – garlic
1 teaspoon – Kosher salt
¼ teaspoon – cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon – black pepper

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend well

Doc Howard practiced in Michigan around the time of the Civil War. He was, as we say now, a homeopathic doctor – creating his own concoctions and medicines from natural sources such as herbs, spices, elixirs, poultices, pills, waters, chemicals and minerals.

Doc Howard’s discipline as a doctor covered a wide range of ailments and conditions from chronic diseases and minor surgery, to dental issues and pregnancy.

Through his commitment as a doctor, he made an impression on the community. He was remembered fondly by many as very intelligent, dedicated and vigorous man who could be tactless at times. Harold Washburn, his great-grandson, reminisced saying “[Doc Howard] had a keen mind and sense of humor that was long remembered. Sometimes his patient approach was such that it would shock a psychiatrist today. In spite of his patience with children, he could be very abrupt and blunt with adults. He is known to have told one woman that there was nothing wrong with her that he could put to rights. ‘Fanny, go find a good man and marry him’ was his dismissal.”

Doc Howard’s office in Greenfield Village is installed to approximately the year 1864 – a year in which we have very reliable documentation of his recipes and some insight in to his practice. It looks like a modest, typical, rural doctor’s office with a waiting room, a long wooden bench, a desk, an old cot and an old cast iron stove. His office in the back room has shelves filled with authentic glass bottles of various sizes, actually used by Doc himself, and labeled by our staff based on his recipes, ledgers, receipts and books he kept in his library.

His laboratory is where Doc concocted his medications and includes vats of plants and a large mortar and pestle which visitors can try out for themselves and grind up some dried herbs. The pill room is a tiny room you might miss, but is made just for that – making pills.

The ingredients Doc Howard used for his medicines came from his garden (and also from the land around him.) This garden, lovingly maintained by the Village Herb Associates Volunteer Staff, was designed and developed with information found in his journal, which we have in our collection. Doc Howard would have also collected bark, herbs and roots from local swamps, forests, lakes, prairies and roadsides that may not be represented in the garden.

So all in all, Doc Howard was a great physician of his time – innovative with his medicines using what the earth gave him. He’s just one of the fascinating people and stories we have in Greenfield Village. Come and check out his office and see if you can picture yourself standing in line just to see him, or lying on the old cot and having him pull an aching tooth. Stop by to see the garden too, we love to talk about every plant in there!