Pare six large winter pears, and either quarter them or do them whole: they make a pretty dish with one whole, the rest cut in quarters, and the cores taken out; lay them in a deep earthern pot, with a few cloves, a piece of lemon-peel, a gill of red wine, and a quarter of a pound of fine sugar; if the pears are very large, they will take half a pound of sugar, and half a pint of red wine; cover them close with brown paper, and bake them till they are enough.
Serve them hot or cold (just as you like them), and they will be very good with water in the place of wine.
What a way to end our fall demo season! We enjoyed a lovely day at St. Albans in D.C., where several teachers at the school had designed their early fall curriculum around something related to blacksmithing, (i.e. Adam Smith, the importance of metal and forging to world civilizations, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the industrialization of Europe, etc…) and asked us to teach and demonstrate to those various topics.
We have met thousands and thousands of interesting people while demo’ing for four+ years, but we’ve never had a demo start with student-written odes to metallurgy!
In addition, all the students and teachers got the opportunity to make (and take!) a colonial-style nail.
It was just the sort of demo that Jeff and I love to do, and we are very thankful for the opportunity to work with St. Albans. Also, we’d like to thank the members of the football team and other student athletes for helping us load our equipment afterwards!
Last Saturday, we enjoyed being part of an 1812 Festival and Military Reenactment at the beautiful Jefferson Patterson Park in Maryland. As usual, we were demonstrating the art of blacksmithing and had a great time doing so. We knew we were doing something right when a visitor called us the “Friendly Forge”!
We had one of Jeff’s blacksmithing students working with us and they had lots of fun together — plus, they made some beautiful pieces in between their jokes!
This demo was interesting because we usually demo in either modern or colonial clothing, although the interpretation for blacksmithing is not terribly different for any of these time periods, including the 1812 period.
The clothing (particularly the women’s clothing) is quite different, though! When my boys saw me in a dress appropriate to the 1812 time period, they were rather scandalized because it showed so much more skin around the neckline than my colonial outfits….never mind that they are used to me in modern clothes!
All in all, lots of fun on a gorgeous Saturday….
We had a lot of fun this past weekend, demo’ing at Stratford Hall’s Wine and Oyster Festival. You know it’s going to be a great time when you make new friends within a few minutes of arriving…and the weekend did not disappoint. We met some lovely people (and even ran into old friends, too!) and had a good time teaching about blacksmithing.
Jeff had two students with him, and they all had a great time working on various pieces for the several thousand visitors who came to enjoy the wine and oysters in Stratford’s beautiful setting.
