Free Book Excerpts

Play bridge and join a subterranean sisterhood that never dies.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

In a recent book, The Friendship Crisis, Marla Paul evokes nostalgia for her mother’s weekly bridge club. She remembers getting out of bed to spy on them, recalls the laughter and “gossipy whispers floating upstairs like a promise…a glimpse of my future.”  That generation “sank roots into neighborhoods like an ancient oak…playing bridge…with the same women for decades.”  No friendship crisis then.
Bridge Table is about the history and pop culture of the kind of bridge played by Marla Paul’s mom—sociable bridge (as opposed to serious bridge). That airy title question—What’s Trump Anyway?—reflects the spirit and the essence of sociable bridge. In a serious game, the question would be appalling—someone might call the director. During a sociable bridge game? Not a big thing.
This is informal history, told in fifty-two “cards” and four “hands” (like bridge) of notes, quotes, anecdotes, menus, recipes, trivia, opinion. Bridge & Me is a sub-theme.
Sociable bridge can be defined as a melding of friendships that last for decades, food, and a stress-free bridge game symbolized by the bridge table around which food is shared and a classic card game played. Its millions of women players are a subterranean sisterhood—uncounted and uncountable.

Bridge Table, far as I know, is the first book to tell the story of sociable bridge. It hopscotches down the paper trail left by the ladies-only bridge club in women’s magazines and cookbooks of the 20s through the 60s, the New York Times, general magazines, and books on popular culture and bridge history.
As a cookbook, Bridge Table is in the “armchair”  category—more about old cookbooks and food history than cooking, more about menus than recipes—intended to nudge readers to seek out old cookbooks and recipes, throw a Retro bridge party, and/or revive the classic menus of ladies-only lunch.
You don’t have to play bridge to enjoy Bridge Table—but women of today ought to learn! Science is tellng us these days that for a dementia-free old age, it’s better to have played bridge badly than never to have played at all.
The 90s were the Retro decade and the nostalgia for her mom’s bridge club reflected in Marla Paul’s Friendship Crisis is part of that whole Retro trend. By the 90s, those same boomer students of the 60s who rejected their parents’ pop culture began   taking up, in Retro, icons of the 50s suburban lifestyle— martinis, steak houses, bridge.  Can a revival of ladies-only lunch and its gender menus be far behind?
In Robert Parker’s mystery, Back Story, a college student of the 60s recalls the prevailing attitude on campus back then. “My father was in the Rotary Club, for God’s sake. My mother played f—— bridge!”  Anything parents did (and they certainly played a lot of bridge in the 50s and 60s) “we couldn’t possibly do.”
That hostility era is all over now and today there is a spurt of 50-plus newcomers to bridge, both serious and sociable. The time is right for Bridge Table.

Historically, sociable bridge is the unwanted offspring of its serious bridge parents—the bridge establishment and the ACBL (American Contract Bridge League). Except for a few golden years in the 30s, there’s always been an unbridgeable chasm between the two kinds of bridge.  One bridge player back in the early days described sociable bridge as “kitchen bridge…the lowest form of bridge life.”
That we (sociables) outnumber them (serious players) by the millions is evidence that sociable bridge players have never been concerned about what their “betters”  thought of them. The ladies-only bridge club has been despised by the bridge establishment (for its casual, chatty bridge game), by the culinary establishment (for its Jell-O salads and creamy somethings on toast) and by moral critics who took the women to task for wasting time on bridge.
Today bridge is thought of as a game for older women, retirees, senior centers. Until the 70s, however, bridge was at the heart of America’s social life for women of all ages—a middle class tradition passed on from mother to daughter.  For college-bound daughters, learning to play bridge was like a rite of passage. If they didn’t learn to play bridge at home, they learned at college. Bridge was rampant in dorms and sororities.
Then came campus turmoil, feminism and Betty Friedan. For young women, taking up mom’s favorite bridge game at college was no longer politically correct. Their mothers, on the other hand, mostly went right on playing bridge with their bridge clubs—unto today. Some were members of three or four  women-only clubs.
Sociable bridge is a phenomenon of popular culture and women’s history. Serious bridge, because it has the American Contract Bridge League to see to it, will survive. The survival of sociable bridge, on the other hand (along with the ritual gender menus of ladies lunch) depends upon boomer daughters taking up their mom’s favorite game so that it doesn’t die off with my generation of ever-older bridge-playing women.
It took two women’s movements of the 19th century merged with a classic card game to create the ladies-only bridge club tradition. It deserves to survive another hundred years.

One is supposed to answer three questions in a book’s introduction—why this book, why now—which I’ve answered. Why me is the third, and why so late in life? What took so long?
I first thought to do a bridge cookbook back in 1960, and actually started to write one then, and again in 1987.  An anthology of popular culture writing, Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf, happened upon at Miami Public Library in 1987, completely sidetracked me into popular culture and the history of bridge. One thing leads to another when you like to hang out at libraries and browse the book stacks! Bridge Table was no longer just a cookbook project and I was hooked.
The problem is, hanging out at the library is fun, settling down to put all those notes you gather into a book is hard work. No one was out there waiting for my book manuscript and so it became my dabbling hobby for two decades.
I made several serious efforts over the years to organize my notes into an outline–usually when I came across some new bit of information that galvanized me for a few months. I did so in 1995, 1999, 2001—only to quit in frustration.
Then, around 2003, I came upon If You Can Talk You Can Write by Joel Saltzman. His 50-short-chapter format in five sections was a light bulb moment. For my bridge book, 52 short chapters in four sections (like a bridge deck) was the answer. I would, however, call them “cards”  and “hands.” Saltzman believes in adapting other writers’ solutions to your own work—so I did.  After that, I knew the book was do-able.
I have no excuse for the years after 2004 except  procrastination, thinking I’ll live forever. Then, in 2007 (by this time I’m 87!), someone suggested to me I’d probably never finish Bridge Table because I subconsciously felt I’d die if I finished it.
Well! That led me to thinking, what would happen to all my books and cookbooks and fifty-two files and boxes of 3 x 5’s I’d collected over the years if I died before publishing the book? Like Marley forcing Scrooge, to witness his own funeral I envisioned my daughter Maria having to deal with the “stuff”   from years of research—putting it all into black plastic bags and depositing in the condo dumpster.
That did it. I resolved to finish the book manuscript by the end of 2008, edit and refine in 2009, and have it in print by the end of that year—or toss it all into the dumpster myself on January 1, 2010.  Despite that generous two-year schedule, I just barely made my deadline.

Because Bridge Table is entirely based on the paper trail found in libraries, what’s missing are stories of real women—recollections of those who lived through the 50s and 60s and hears stories of their mother’s bridge club back to the 20s.
Depending upon response from readers and the energy of this author, perhaps with the magic of the internet, Bridge Table or What’s Trump Anyway?  can be the catalyst for  making the ladies-only bridge lunch part of gender food studies by scholars, and bridge club memories part of women’s history.
A way, finally, of being counted.
Maggy Simony, 2009

First Hand

No one in 1925 could have predicted that by the close of the decade, auction bridge would be well on its way to oblivion.
During the early years of the twentieth century, card playing was frowned upon for religious reasons in many parts of America. Even then, exception was often made for bridge. Bridge, like its forbear whist, had always enjoyed special status—different somehow from other card games. Many churches would make an exception for bridge, allowing fundraising bridge events on their premises.
Middletown is a groundbreaking study of mid-American popular culture, by Helen and Robert Lynd, published in 1929. The town studied was said to be Muncie, Indiana. Comparing newspaper accounts of card parties in 1890 and 1923, the authors found just one such party in a three-month period in 1890, thirty for the same three months in 1923. That figure of thirty, they said, “would probably be greatly increased if more of the informal clubs could have been found and included.”  From the start, and unto today, sociable bridge has been an uncountable activity because of absence of a paper trail..
This increase in playing cards was credited to post-World War I prosperity, the revolutionary 48-hour work week, and changing social mores. A mass of people for the first time had leisure time formerly enjoyed by only the better-off. Playing bridge had spread from fad status amongst New York’s upper class to middle class America. By 1924, according to the Lynds, the bias against card playing had virtually disappeared, except amongst “religious working class families.”

The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1927)
Fannie Farmer died in 1915; her name and cookbooks live on. This 1927 edition was edited by Cora Perkins, had the same preface as the 1923 edition, and included most of A New Book of Cookery (sequel to the original 1896 cookbook) published in 1912 by Fannie herself.
It is a very different book from the original 1896 edition, with four times as many salads. And yes, indeed, this later edition includes several of the silly salads that have been put forward by critics as dreadful examples of the domestic science influence on American cuisine.
Heliofolis Salad, for example, combines celery, apples and tomatoes with parboiled green pepper. Dixie Salad is a combination of endive, apples, tomatoes and hardboiled eggs. Rosalie Salad is an odd combination of celery root, canned peaches and pistachio nuts. A cup of celery and half a cup of peanuts: voila, another salad.
The banana salad in the original cookbook is still there, along with Banana Salad II, which is bananas cut in thirds crosswise, rolled in chopped peanuts and arranged on lettuce with sliced tangerine.
Los Angeles Fruit Salad combines marshmallows with canned pineapple, oranges, walnuts and Malaga grapes that have been seeded, peeled and cut in half.
Waldorf Salad, created by the chef of the Waldorf-Astoria is included, and it survives today, with variations, often at supermarket deli counters.
Moquin Salad is an example of a recipe intended, by the domestic science movement aficionados, to take the drudgery out of cooking by engaging the cook’s creativity. Oh, the work involved! Moquin Salad calls for three-quarters cup of grapes that have not only been peeled and seeded, but stuffed with strips of pimento. They are then combined with two and one-half cups of orange and tangerine sections freed from their seeds and white membrane. A quarter cup of finely chopped nuts are mashed into a “large cream cheese”  and moistened with enough French dressing to enable forming into grape-sized balls. The stuffed grapes, citrus segments and grape-sized cream cheese balls are then arranged attractively on lettuce.
Jell-O was invented soon after Fannie published her original cookbook. With its flavors and jewel-like colors, the potential for ladies lunch menus to include congealed salads, aspics and desserts of every flavor and hue was limitless. Decorative jellied salads, says Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad, were seen as especially appropriate for ladies, “reflecting the image of frailty attached to the women who made them.”  Often it’s hard to tell whether a recipe is for a salad or a dessert. Easy, said Jell-O: if it’s a dessert it gets a dab of whipped cream, if it’s a salad, a dab of mayonnaise.

Electric Refrigerator Recipes (1927)
General Electric created the first widely-used electric refrigerator, and with it published a cookbook, written by Alice Bradley. It is a lovely little book in a cover elegant enough to contain a book of poetry. Bradley compares owning an electric refrigerator to “almost having an Aladdin’s lamp and not knowing the right way to rub it”  and promises that with this book women can make all the drug store favorites. “Why go out to the soda fountain when you can have a chocolate or maple nut sundae at an instant’s notice by visiting your own refrigerator?”
There always had been frozen salads (like gelatin, freezing offered another total control device for messy veggies and fruit salads) but the freezing process had been complicated. Now anybody with a refrigerator could serve frozen salads, while at the same time show off a bit, impress guests, and proclaim that this hostess already had discarded her icebox. This hostess did not have to put a Need Ice card in the window for the ice man, or put up with his muddy feet when he delivered it.
The following two frozen salads are typical, but why freeze them, except to impress upon guests that one owned a refrigerator?
General Electric’s recipe for Frozen Lobster Salad called for combining a cup of lobster (or fish, shrimp, chicken) with half a cup of white sauce and half a cup of stock in which a tablespoon of gelatin had been soaked and dissolved, a bit of salt and nutmeg. Chill until the mixture is thickened. Fold in three-quarters cup of heavy cream that has been beaten until stiff and one-half cup of mayonnaise. Freeze in a refrigerator tray. Serve on a bed of lettuce.
Frozen Pineapple Salad is the kind of 1920s salad that earns the scorn of modern food critics, resembling a dessert more than a salad. Combine half a cup of cream cheese blended with quarter cup of salad dressing. Beat in half a pound of marshmallows cut fine, and a small can of crushed pineapple. Whip a half pint of cream until stiff, fold in. Freeze three hours. Serve with salad dressing and a cherry—pass hot toasted crackers.

Read more about Bridge Table or What’s Trump Anyway? and Maggy Simony HERE.

Copyright 2009 Maggy Simony. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.