year end Newsletter december 19th

a letter from scott

In this Newsletter the General brings you all the traditional signs of the season: stories with sleigh bells, visions of holly and mistletoe, mukbang* videos...wait...What?  That’s right. In this episode of TKKS,  Katie and Kelsey eat through our entire menu of salads and sandwiches for your virtual pleasure. Chef Danny joins them to serve the dishes, describe the secret sauces and special ingredients, and offer a shout-out to our local farm and brewery partners.  Click on the video, enjoy the mukbang fun, and then order these great meals for yourself. 

In addition to the mukbang, this week we are featuring profiles of a few of Harvard’s local artisans: Kristin Kelley-Muñoz, Connie Barton, Robin Hu, and Mark Adams. Please support them by making their products part of your annual holiday gift giving tradition.  We have also included a friendly reminder of all the specials still available at the General to make your holiday shopping safe and easy.  There is still time to order bakery specials like cookie decorating kits, coffee cakes, scones, and Bûches de Noël; gift baskets from the wine shop; and baskets filled with local products and specialty items...and don’t forget our 15% discount on all liquor and sparkling wines until January 1st.

Personal Shopping times are still available, providing you with the safest way to shop. Call for reservations or click here. 

*Don’t know what a mukbang is? Watch the video.

-Scott

tkks mukbang the menu

We figured now, the holiday season of bulking up, is as good a time as ever to eat our way through the HGS menu. Chef Danny really outdid himself for our comprehensive tasting menu, and honestly and truly everything is delicious. We’re still full! We are also so excited to share that having dinner at the store is even easier now that we are on GrubHub! Order delivery or curbside while you’re recovering from this week’s storm.

Prepared foods, including favorites like our lasagna, are also back in store. We’ve expanded take out to be Thursday, Friday, Saturday AND Sunday!

Recipes, local profiles, store deals & More!

PRE-ORDER BUCHE DE NOEL AND SUGAR COOKIE KITS!

Our famous Bûche de Noël is finally here! If you know...you know. Pre-order this holiday classic by (tomorrow) December 20! Our incredible bakery staff has also whipped up family friendly cookie decorating kits. The kits include a dozen sugar cookies with all the accoutrements for cookie creativity! The bakery also has smaller full sized coffee cakes, dozens of scones, cookies and croissants to bake at home. Check it out here!

spotlight on: local artisans

We are so proud to be supporting local Harvard artisans this season in the store. An incredible sense of community has bubbled up from ‘hunkering down’, and we are so grateful to our customers and neighbors for supporting local.

Right now in the gift shop we’re featuring four Harvard artisans:

Kristin Kelley-Muñoz and her incredible hand-loomed dish towels from Shaker Hill Studios. These gorgeous textiles are loomed by Kristin at home in her Harvard studio. The design is based on towels woven by the Shakers at Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. An ode to the Harvard Shakers as well, these super absorbent dish towels are 50% linen and 50% organic cotton. We literally cannot keep them on the shelves.  They come in tons of fun colors— get yours today before they are gone! 

Mark Adams of Bare Hill Woodworks has been making cutting boards for The General for the past few years. His incredible woodworking talents are used here for various apple-shaped cutting boards made from oak, cherry, and walnut (depending on what he can source.) A true ‘Harvard’ item, Mark’s boards (currently) come in two sizes and make awesome gifts. 

For the first time this holiday season we’ve teamed up with Connie Barton of Harvard Knitting Company! Connie has hand-knit  incredible “pop over” scarfs to keep you cozy all winter long. Her claim to fame, however, is her kids’ pom-pom hats! These delightfully fun and colorful beanies are hand-knit in Harvard and perfect for the kiddos in your life. They are sized for ages 4-10 years, and the pom-poms are removable so you can collect all different color poms-poms and mix and match!

When Robin Hu bought her home on Mass. Avenue (across from Bromfield), she dreamed of starting a farmstand for her neighbors. Lo and behold, a few years later her dream became a reality. She started “Porchside Farmstand” where she sells fresh eggs from her chickens, home grown veggies and flowers in the summertime, and tons of products from her bees--all from her front porch. We’ve teamed up with Robin (who has a long history of soap-making and other self care salves and balms) to sell her incredible beeswax chapsticks and body balm. They are great for sensitive skin, babies, and children or on those dry (very clean, washed for the millionth time) hands!

We have tons more local and New England-based products in the store. We still have appointments available between NOW and New Year’s Eve! Make your appointment today to shop locally, support your neighbors, and have the safety of the store to yourself (up to a total of 4 pod-members!) 

santa’s arrival at the firments

Submitted by Emily Firment: Every Christmas morning I can remember I have memories of running into my sisters room bright and early - she was always a sounder sleeper than me. The excitement of Santa’s arrival pulsing through my little veins. Would the stockings be full? Would the cookies be eaten? Did the reindeer get their carrots? Were presents magically under the tree? All the thoughts and wonders of a child on Christmas morning.

Once my sister was dragged out of bed, we would stumble downstairs and find the living room full of cheer and good tidings. The chaos of Christmas morning would commence. But what made our morning truly special was always Christmas brunch. After the wrapping paper was tossed aside and the stockings emptied, we would turn to the dining room table where a true Western PA feast awaited us. The menu hasn’t changed in 32 years. Actually add a few more years to account for all the years my grandfather cooked this same meal throughout my mom’s childhood (exact number of years not disclosed).

MENU:

“Christmas eggs” - scrambled with red and green peppers
Hash browns - deeply browned with sauteed onions and ketchup to dip
Cheddar cheese and sliced tomato
Breakfast meats - bacon, kielbasa, AND sausage. In the 90s, the sausage was dropped from the menu (“heart healthy”) but the kielbasa portion doubled.
Fruit salad - to make the meal appear healthier (my sister and I did not the eat the fruit salad)
Toast and English muffins - didn’t we mention this was a healthy meal?

This menu was a gift from my grandfather and a tradition I look forward to continuing with my family. Especially the kielbasa. Maybe not the fruit salad.

roseanne’s christmas day cherry almond poundcake

Submitted by Roseanne Saalfield: It’s a recipe my family considers as critical to Christmas as the tree, or their stockings. (I am as reluctant to stop filling stockings in Santa’s cause as I am to stop baking this cake for them.)  It’s a beloved recipe from the former Globe writer, Sheryl Julian, still much missed.

For years I shared this cake with lots and lots of friends, sometimes making the recipe as many as five times (yes, 15 loaves).  This good, simple cake is served on Christmas morning around here, and at no other time of the year. The only exception was the year my mom died. I found an extra loaf buried at the bottom of the freezer and brought it out in April to share with her and my siblings.

Two traditions we uphold without fail each holiday season:

Jim reads us all Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’, maybe on Christmas Eve or sometimes after Christmas if we’re in a time crunch.

We also always head to Cambridge for a performance of Christmas Revels at Sanders Theater. This year, the 50th anniversary, Revels goes on line which is as odd and sad as everything else Covid has changed, at least for a while. The silver lining is that we can watch the performance as many times as we want.

Our 13 year old granddaughter has been coming with us since she was three. Can’t wait to take one year old Charlotte, even if I have to go to Brooklyn and bring her to the Manhattan performance.

I mentioned the stockings, which everyone does. When the boys were young I copied a Scandinavian tradition that requires children to leave their shoes on the hearth. In the morning the shoes will be filled with gifts, left by St Nicholas. In our family, they leave their shoes outside their bedroom doors and yes, all these years later much bigger shoes are being left in the hallway by much bigger people, and their wives, girlfriends and babies.

(In Scandinavia this tradition is repeated on Dec 6, St Nicholas, the feast of St Nicholas. (It also happens to be Jon’s birthday.) We have corrupted this tradition and moved it to Christmas morning. For many years, we have shared Christmas Eve with a few other Harvard families. The Pearce/Paynes on Bolton Rd, the Cutlers on Stow Rd. The Browns, of Slough Rd, were included till they moved away. The Williams Family of Bolton Rd (resident in our own original Harvard house) were also included. They moved to Maine. In addition to the very good food we all pull together, we close the evening with a carol sing. Once the very able Glen Williams could no longer play piano to accompany our carols, we used a mix tape of carols pulled together by Molly Cutler.

CHERRY ALMOND POUNDCAKE

Ingredients 

1 cup unsalted butter

2 cups sugar 

4 eggs, room temp, separated 

1 cup whole milk, room temp 

2 tsp vanilla 

3/4 tsp almond extract 

4 cups flour 

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 tsp salt 

2 cups maraschino cherries, drained and halved and gently dried

1/4 cherry juice

Keep extra cherries for garnishing

Directions

Grease with butter and dust with flour three loaf pans. Cream butter and add sugar gradually, blending well and from time to time scraping down the sides of the bowl. Add yolks to creed mixture. 

Add milk, extracts, and cherry juice and stir. With a clean and dry beater beat egg whites together in a separate bowl until stiff and glossy. Fold into batter 1/3 at a time. Gently fold in Cheries and spoon into pans. Add extra cherries to the top. 

Bake at 350 for about 50-60 mins.

WIllie Wickman’s party special

Submitted by Willie Wickman For our annual Christmas Eve party we serve a favorite that keeps the friends coming back! I can't tell you specific amounts but people can easily figure it out. Frozen mini meatballs such as Swedish or turkey, simmer in ketchup and grape jelly, maybe half and half? Not sure since I always eyeball it! I put them in a chafing dish and folks help themselves with toothpicks.I also make an egg salad and put in it the shape of a candy cane, layer of chopped onions, mixture of a little sour cream and mayo to make the top smooth, caviar (red and black usually) for the stripes of a candy cane! I always serve with pumpernickel bread.

themed dinners with the kendalls & potters  

Submitted by Ginger Kendall: The Kendalls and the Potter’s have been spending Christmas together for years. Every year, Ginger, David and Weezie along with the kids (Jamie, Sam & Ellie & Rohan) come up with a themed Christmas dinner. Themes have included: Dickens, when we cooked a goose (not so great), British Bake-off when we made gorgeous raised meat and veggie pies, Mexican was last year (so good!) and two years ago was Duck-two ways (rosemary & orange and orange & ginger) . And then there was the year we did paella on the grill - if we ever repeat, it will be to have paella again. This year is Chinese, with a noodle recipe, but since it is a Zoom Christmas, we will cook one dish together: scallion pancakes. One year, Ellie made sweet potato fries and they were a giant hit. So now regardless of theme we partake in sweet potatoes fries (along with homemade dipping sauces.) Always on the menu: champagne cocktails -- with a sugar cube and a dash of bitters.

Lynne Wood’s Finnish Coffee Bread

Submitted by Lynne Wood: My favorite Aunt Elvie was Finnish and a fabulous baker/cook. I loved her to bits; she was like a second mother to me. During the holidays my sister would make the bread too and between both of us, we’d make sure my brother or my Mom got some. I’d usually make for neighbors and switch off with my other go-to butter crunch. The bread can be made in one big free form loaf but I would put in 4 small tins for gift giving. I’m making the bread this year, for the first time in a long time, for a few folks who have done so much for me over past few months...One neighbor loves popovers, so I’ll make those, just bought a popover pan to go with the recipe so can make his own in future!

tug hill diary

by Scott Hayward

I grew up on the Tug Hill Plateau. In the fifties, Tug Hill was a remote relatively roadless region of upstate New York between Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Mountains. Summer weather had its moments but was mostly gray skies and black flies sandwiched between warm days that would fill the sunset with sparkling insects.  Swimming in the shallow Salmon River was less a relief from heat as a cold obligation to the season. Under every rock skittered a crayfish, and water striders crabbed awkwardly across the surface. Christmas was always white. The snowpack in winter was so deep we had to cut steps down onto the porch. One year, after a particularly heavy snowfall my sisters and I rode saucers on snow drifts out our second floor windows, and in the days when snowy roads were rolled, not plowed, everyone had a draft horse and sleigh. The landscape was lined with rivers filled with trout, steep falls that turned electric turbines, and a patchwork of forests, dairy farms, and apple orchards.  My grandfather was a hunting and fishing guide, my father managed the power plant, and my best friend’s family owned the largest Holstein farm in New York. Everybody had their lane.

We lived in a small hamlet of seven houses on the south side of Bennett’s Bridge that spanned the Salmon River between the upper and lower reservoirs just outside the gates of a Powerhouse. The bridge was covered. The houses were from Sears Roebuck, and the Powerhouse dominated our lives. There were four houses on our side of the road and three on the other. We lived in the largest house at the far end of the hamlet next to the large company barn where we kept our horse, Nelly, and her sleighs and eventually all the four-wheel drive vehicles for the linemen. Nelly was a gift, a payment really, for a tank of gas my father loaned a farmer one day who had run out on his way home from the feed store in Sandy Creek. The farmer thought he got the better deal.   

The house had a large front porch framed from the road by two enormous blue spruce trees, and just inside the front door on the right was a small room where the crank telephone hung on a wall and my mother had installed an upright piano that she thought I was going to learn how to play.  When you cranked the telephone a woman named Carol answered and connected your call. I tried to imagine who Carol was, where she lived, and what she did waiting for someone to crank her into action.  When my dad had an emergency, lines down or a leak in the old wooden pipeline that ran water from the upper reservoir down to the turbines in the Powerhouse, I remember him cranking the hell out of that telephone and swearing at Carol to hurry up and get somebody named Smitty in Pulaski on the line. 

The company barn was enormous. Its plain geometry was crowned by a large gable roof and its vertical siding was weathered to a silver gray. Two tall stories faced the road with a short entrance ramp, a double sliding barn door, and a smattering of windows. In the rear, facing the pasture and the remnants of an old apple orchard, the two upper stories were held aloft by large relocated tree trunks that exposed the basement floor to the open air. This basement was home to a large cone-shaped manure pile that nearly touched the underside of the barn floor. Along with the apples and Nelly, horseradish and rhubarb grew wild in the pasture. In the fall Nelly would get drunk on rotting apples, and in the spring my mom would pickle the horseradish and make rhubarb pies until the big stalks gave out. 

Once inside and your eyes adjusted, the barn appeared column-free and cavernous. Pigeons, high above and out of sight, slapped their wings when you entered and just as quickly settled back down. It was cool and dark except when sunbeams filled with sawdust streamed through cracks in the shrunken siding. It reminded me of pictures I had seen at my Grandma’s house of light rays coming down from heaven. The front and back walls of the barn reached all the way to the roof, its large rafters hewn straight from fallen trees. The four-wheel drives were stored along the back wall, and Nelly’s sleighs were angled off to the right. We had quite a few—a small red Santa’s sleigh with a curled front board and a black cushioned horsehair bench that sat three, a two-wheel brightly colored green and yellow pony cart with two long shafts that rested on the barn floor, and a family sleigh that had a wooden front bench and an area in the rear like the bed of a pick-up. This was the one we took out most often for hay rides. To the left of the entrance was a two-story space with horse stalls and a tack room under a big hay loft. Nelly lived over there in her own stall with a couple of barn cats in the neighboring stall to keep her company and control the mice. They seemed to have a big litter of kittens every year who had to find new homes. My dad shoveled the squashed horse balls that piled up under Nelly down a hatch in the floor where they rolled onto the big pile in the basement. He would try to get me to do it but I always found a more urgent responsibility. 

Every year on a cold clear night during Christmas week, my mother would insist on hitching Nelly to the family sleigh for a night ride. Just after dark we all left the warmth of the house, the tree, and the colored lights and paraded in single file from house to barn bundled in snowsuits and boots, each of us carrying our own woolen blanket. The silent night was broken only by the squeak and crunch of frozen snow. My dad was already at the barn harnessing Nelly. When we arrived we filled the bed with hay from the loft and loaded it with the blankets, and my dad would lead Nelly by her bridle out of the barn.  Once outside, Nelly stood at attention awaiting her orders.  We climbed up, crawled in back, and curled up under the blankets while my mom sat against the back of the front seat with two children on either side and thermoses of hot cocoa tucked beside her.  After snapping the reins and shouting “Git-up!,” my dad clucked and prodded Nelly forward, and we lurched and laughed our way out on the snow-covered road.  

We lived in a river valley so it took some time to get up to the high plateau. Nelly had a desire for freedom and struggled with the bit. My Dad had his hands full, but once she was resigned to her task she trotted, breast strap jangling with sleigh bells and only occasionally did she try to escape from the reins. When the road finally leveled off, the landscape stretched out to the horizon with just enough starlight to see our way. The heavy work was done, and Nelly could settle down to a comfortable walk, her big ass swaying and snapping her long tail at my dad’s face. Here it was that from behind her back my mom would pull out “The Big Book of the Stars,” open it, and with a small flashlight begin to locate in the book and point out in the sky the various constellations.  My sisters would compete to see who could find the Big Dipper and the North Star. I joined in, but my favorite was Orion. Its big bright stars started low in the southern sky and reached way up above our heads. My mom taught me to quickly locate him by his three-starred belt and sword.  

Sometimes from the sleigh, we were lucky enough to see the Northern Lights. My Dad would shout “Look, look!” and point excitedly high above Nelly’s head. We would have to get up and turn around in the sleigh to see them shimmering like iridescent curtains. My Dad would pull Nelly up so we could all stand safely, and just as quickly as the lights appeared they would flicker and be gone like a supernatural mirage. When we were sure they wouldn't reappear, we would settle back down in the hay and busy ourselves with peanut butter cookies and hot cocoa that my Mom passed around in plastic thermos caps and listen for owls hunting as the moon came up. 

There was only one house up on the plateau, a little cottage that sat surrounded by a large open field not far from where we stopped for cocoa just off the road in a small copse of trees. In the darkness it was barely visible but for a brightly lit window that flickered from a wood fire and a grayish plume that ascended from the chimney. When we were finished with the cocoa and cookies, my Dad would look back at us and say, “OK ready, hold on,“ snap the reins, shout “Git up!,” and begin walking Nelly up to a good point in the road to turn around. As we reached the cottage the front door opened, and a man stepped out to pick up a few logs stacked on the porch. He looked up, squinted to see who we were, and waved as we passed. I could see into the cottage through the open door. It looked cozy and comfortable and made me wish we were already home. After turning the sleigh around my dad coaxed Nelly to a trot and returned us to the barn, the warm house, the tree, and the colored lights.