"Roughing It" with the Bros in Fort Myers: The Edison and Ford Winter Estates

 

        The Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Ft. Myers, Florida recently hosted its annual "Airing of the Quilts" event on its grounds.  The members of the Southwest Florida Quilters Guild display their creations on clotheslines in front of the cottages built by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.  It was a perfect opportunity for us to explore the historic site for the first time.  

        In 1885, inventor Thomas Edison traveled to the wilds of Ft. Myers Florida, scouting for a winter home site.  Smitten, he purchased 13 acres for $2,750 and immediately began designing a family home, a guest cottage, and a laboratory.  He called it Seminole Lodge, and the Edison family spent their winters there, frequently hosting famous guests including Henry Ford, naturalist John Burroughs, industrialist Harvey Firestone, and Herbert Hoover.  Edison and his guests enjoyed the Florida outdoors, swimming, shelling, boating, and fishing for huge tarpon and other fish.  He also worked from time to time, and developed a major interest in botany, using his laboratory and acreage to experiment with various plants for industrial use.

Various pictures of the Seminole Lodge and guest house

    In 1916, Henry Ford bought the property next door to his buddy and built a bungalow that was christened The Mangos.  

    Ford, Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs often went camping together around Florida and beyond.  They, or their underlings, packed their Model Ts and stocked their chuck wagon, complete with camp cook, and hit the road. Maybe they made smores around the campfire and told stories about how they abused their employees, electrocuted dogs, and spread racist propaganda.

    The museum on site contains quite a few interesting displays covering the careers and contributions of both men, minus any controversy or negativity.  The botanical laboratory is also open for visitors, and the Estates have quite an active gardening group which offers workshops, classes, and plant sales throughout the year.  

        The Edison and Ford Winter Estates are worth a visit. Website https://www.edisonfordwinterestates.org/  It's a great look into the lives of two of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.  

The Wonderful World of Windsor

 

    A little over two years ago, founding Histocrat Margaret Duncan and her husband David moved from metro Atlanta to Windsor, United Kingdom because David's employer transferred him to its London headquarters.  It's been an absolute dream come true for Margaret, a lover of all things historic and an avid Anglophile.  When we started planning our trip to London, we knew that a day trip to Windsor had to happen.  Honestly, my expectations were low, but - whoa! - Windsor definitely exceeded all expectations.

    Windsor is a short 15 minutes by train from Paddington Station in London, so it couldn't have been more convenient, especially when you have friends willing to pick you up and play tour guides for the day.  Windsor is of course dominated by Windsor Castle, Windsor Castle is the longest-occupied palace in Europe.  the original castle on the site was built in the 11th century, but much of the current structure dates back to the 1200s.  Over the centuries, it has been renovated and enlarged and modified by various monarchs, and in 1992, a major fire devastated the castle, and it took years of reconstruction, which led to some great archaeological and historical discoveries.  From 2011 to 2022, it served as the primary residence of Queen Elizabeth II, and it has hosted many great state dinners and events over the years.  Today, it is a major tourist attraction, and there are numerous special events and tours throughout the year to augment the rooms on permanent exhibit.  (Unfortunately, no photos are allowed anywhere inside the castle.)  Also on the grounds is St. George's Chapel, the site of various high-profile royal events recently and the burial place of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. (Windsor Castle website https://www.rct.uk/visit/windsor-castle )

    Your first stop has to be Queen Mary's Dolls House.  From https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/Trails/queen-marys-dolls-house 

Queen Mary's Dolls' House is the largest, most beautiful and most famous dolls' house in the world. Built between 1921 and 1924 for Queen Mary, consort of George V, by the leading British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it includes contributions from over 1,500 of the finest artists, craftsmen and manufacturers of the early twentieth century. From life below stairs to the high-society setting of the salon and dining room, and from a library bursting with original works by the top literary names of the day, to a fully stocked wine cellar and a garden, created by Gertrude Jekyll, no detail was forgotten. The house even includes electricity, running hot and cold water and working lifts. Each room is fully furnished and waiting to be explored.

"It is built to outlast us all. To carry on into the future and different world this pattern of our own. It is a serious attempt to express our age and to show forth in dwarf proportions the limbs of our present world."

A.C. BENSON, THE BOOK OF THE QUEEN'S DOLLS' HOUSE (1924)

There is a video of the Dolls House at the above link. It really is an amazing thing to see in person.

    From the Dolls House, visitors take the self-guided tour through the State Apartments, the public rooms (and a few historic private bedrooms) where the royal family has entertained guests for hundreds of years, knighted illustrious individuals for meritorious service, and hosted huge dinners for heads of state and up to 164 guests.  The rooms are filled with fabulous works art that rival any museum's collection.  (https://www.rct.uk/visit/windsor-castle/highlights-of-windsor-castle#/ )

    From the website:

The ceremonial rooms are the main State Apartments that are used today by the Royal Family. Within these rooms the monarch hosts official visits by Heads of State from other countries, investitures, and awards ceremonies, where British men and women are recognised for their achievements.

Perhaps the most striking room is the Grand Reception Room. With its chandeliers and gilding it was once used as the main ballroom in the Castle. One object you can't miss in this room is the large malachite urn, presented to Queen Victoria by Tsar Nicholas I in 1839, and one of the largest examples outside Russia. Looking around the gold-covered walls and ceilings it's hard to believe that this room was so severely damaged in the fire of 1992. The room was painstakingly repaired to its former glory, which you can see today. 

George IV gave the State Apartments a new grand entrance and staircase, added the colossal Waterloo Chamber, celebrating the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, and created a new set of private rooms within the Castle, the Semi-State Rooms.

    During our visit in September, there were two separate ticketed tours available, a Tower tour and a tour of the Great Kitchen.  Since I had just had surgery in August, we opted not to tackle the 200 steps of the Tower tour, but we took the Great Kitchen Tour, and it was Great. Our tour guide was a delight, absolutely bubbling over with energy and full of great stories of the food, cooking, and feasting that have taken place there.  

    The grounds of Windsor Castle are gorgeous, and the Moat Garden is open for tours at certain times of the year.  As one would expect, the gift shop is great, and you can find almost anything from corgis to gin.

    From the castle, we went on a walkabout of the town and saw some interesting sights including the Crooked House and one of the oldest buildings still standing in Windsor, dating back to the Tudor period.  

    Near the castle is St. John the Baptist Church.  This is an interesting stop because the parishioners proudly display a painting of The Last Supper dating to about 1600; it was a gift to the church from King George III. Just a few months ago, it was joined by a sculpture of the same scene, made up of keys from computer keyboards.

    Finally, it was Sunday, so we crossed the Thames bridge into Eton and went to The George pub for a traditional Sunday Roast dinner.  Well, maybe not finally.  Since we were so close, the Duncans took us on a quick drive-by of Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

    It was an absolutely fabulous day in all regards, and although I had my initial doubts, Windsor Castle has moved up to the top of my favorite royal residences.

British Cuisine: London 2023

     British cuisine has been, and is,  the butt of jokes for at least my entire life. I mean, haggis, beans for breakfast, boiled puddings, eel pie, jellied eel, steak and kidney pies, fish and chips, everything and chips, smelly cheeses, scotch eggs?  The standard line was everything boiled and nothing seasoned.

    Well, things have changed, and things have remained the same. We saw it first-hand on our recent trip to London, our first in decades.  London is one of the greatest international cities in the world, and waves of immigrants from every corner of the former British Empire and beyond have changed British cuisine in the past couple of decades. London restaurants and chefs are considered among the best in the world.  For its first-ever World All-Star Chef competition series, the popular TV show "Top Chef" chose London as its arena earlier this year.  British cuisine has adapted (and not adapted) and been fused with other cuisines, and other ethnic cuisines can be found on every urban neighborhood.  Indian cuisine has practically become the standard British cuisine, with "curry shops" and Indian restaurants everywhere you turn, sometimes next to each other.

    On our trip, we sampled a lot and found bad, good, and great, instead of "the good, the bad, and the ugly."

    The British

     Peckish after our overnight flight, we decided to have a meal at Victoria Station, on our way from the airport to our flat.  We went to a chain restaurant, Wetherspoons, and we ordered traditional English breakfasts, beans and toast, and full (kind of) English. Beans and toast was exactly as promised. My English breakfast consisted of beans, tomato, potato triangles, hard rubber fried eggs, toast, and sausage.  There was no black pudding (blood sausage), but I was perfectly fine with that.  In a word:  gross. The beans were terrible. The sausage was weird, tasteless and a consistency inside reminiscent of pate, mousse, or cat food.  The potatoes and toast were edible.  Not a winning introduction.

    Fortunately, other British fare was much better.  The British Museum offers a really tasty fish & chips, complete with mushy peas.  Its British cheese plate was less successful, meager and bland, except for the blue cheese which was strong and bitter.  We enjoyed much better cheese and meat plates at The Admiralty Pub at Trafalgar Square and at a cheese shop as part of our Camden Market Food Tour.  On Sunday, we were in Windsor, and we had to have a traditional Sunday Roast dinner.  A Sunday Roast is offered at pubs and restaurants across the country, and generally it consists of roast pork, chicken, or beef, roast vegetables, peas, and Yorkshire pudding (a baked pudding/roll).  The Sunday Roast was very successful, but it would have been better if the meat had seen a little salt. 

    We opted not to do a full tea on our trip.  Instead, we just enjoyed an "afternoon cream tea," consisting of tea, scones, clotted cream, and jam.  It was delicious.

 

Fusion

    Following World War II and the dismantling of the British Empire, the UK began absorbing many immigrants from around the world, and each group has contributed greatly to British culture and cuisine.  One can see various examples of fusion of British foods with foreign ingredients and cooking styles.  On our first day, we had a Japanese fried chicken loaded fries dish at the Famous Three Kings Pub near our flat in West Kensington. On our Camden Market Food Tour, we learned that birria tacos (slow cooked beef, pork, or goat tacos served with a jus for dipping) have become a popular breakfast dish in some quarters, and we had a Yorkshire pudding burrito (roast beef, mashed potatoes, and peas, wrapped in a Yorkshire pudding)

Ethnic Options

    Various ethnic restaurants are everywhere. Chinatown, surrounded by Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Soho, and the West End, looked to be almost nothing but restaurants.  Although we didn't partake this time, the food looked great as we walked by.  We had the best Indian food, and one of the best meals of our lives, at the Dishoom in Covent Garden (There are several locations.).  Within 300 feet of our flat in West Kensington, we had our choice of two Italian restaurants, a Lebanese restaurant, a Thai Restaurant, a Japanese bakery, 4 coffee and pastry shops,  three markets, and a British pub.  The food at every one that we sampled was great.  

    London truly is one of the world's great food cities.