Wander around the Arkansas Gazette archive poking stuff and the oddest things fall out.
For instance, the noun "poke."
Before I read the Sept. 19, 1916, Arkansas Gazette, I thought a poke was either a little jab or a big sack. Specifically, a sack to hold the scrawny pig you planned to sell to that first-time pig buyer. The same sort of sack could be used to gather a mess of greens for dinner, maybe even some poke sallet, aka pokeweed.
But to 19th- and early 20th-century Arkansans, a poke was also a ladies hat.
Think of the word "bonnet" and you'll have the style in mind -- awning in the front, hair cave in the rear, maybe a ribbon tied below the chin. Jemima Puddle-duck wears one in Beatrix Potter's little books.
Check out this fashion article from page 12 of that long-ago Gazette:
Pokes Prevail at Cohn Hat Display
"Small hats, large hats, medium hats, standard and bizarre shapes are featured at the annual fall opening of the millinery department of the M.M. Cohn Co., 304-308 Main street.
"Predominant colors this fall will be purple, burgundy, castor and brown. Miss A.V. Counts, manager of the department, says that purple is the most popular color. The fall trimmings show a partiality to metallic laces, gold lace, mole fur and ermine."
(Mole fur! Imagine the desperate mole trapper trying to fill his poke with the tiny pelts.)
"Two attractive combinations that are being shown," the Gazette continues, "are the velvet and chenille and French felt and velvet. Felt hats with hand embroidered flowers are also being shown. Miss Counts says there is a suggestion of ostrich fancies at present, and indications point to popular effects in this."
Pokes Are Popular
Let's finish the same article: "Shapes being exhibited most extensively are the mushroom poke, poke, jockey poke and tams. The soft crown and soft beretta effects are also popular, Miss Counts says. [We would spell that biretta.]
"Two of the hats that are especially featured are a medium black velvet with rose facing and
crown draped with black Chantilly lace. Silver and old rose flowers are the principal decorations; and an "autumn" hat of black velvet, scallopped brim, festooned around the crown with green and russet, are the prevailing colors.
"Another smart bonnet is a large cinnamon velvet top, with [French for a dark brown] facing and ermine and Persian the effects. Smart tailored hats from Halny, Fiske, Bendel, Moorhead, Jurdine and Highland are being shown."
Poke in a poke
I found ads for Little Rock's Pfeifer Bros. store in September 1916 featuring dashing hats that looked nothing at all like Jemima Puddle-duck's classic poke; so I suspect that by 1916 the word had become shorthand for ladies hats with brims.
We do this to fashion nouns today. Our "sneakers" might be rubber-soled canvas shoes with laces, or they might be slip-ons with woven uppers spun from recycled plastic ocean trash, ethylene vinyl acetate midsoles and bottoms shaped like the rockers on a rocking chair. Words change.
Another thing that has changed is the proliferation of hat boxes in the everyday Arkansan's home. Back in the day, people had lidded cylinders to spare. So I imagine housewives pored over this bit of international ladies' news, which appeared two days before they got to read about Miss Counts' optimistic forecast for the ostrich fancies.
Hat Boxes Become
Fireless Cookers
"(From the New York World)
"ROME -- Every American housekeeper who owns a fireless cooker knows that it allows her to go to a matinee and find the dinner all ready on her return. But it is to the honor and glory of Mrs. Guiseppina Bianchi Geisser of Turin, Italy, that she has discovered endless cooking possibilities in the cardboard box that took home her last Easter hat. This is how you do it:
"Take your strongest cardboard hat box and make sure it is neither broken nor cracked. See that the cover shuts tight. These two conditions are absolutely essential.
"Fill your box with either cotton-wool, sawdust or hay, well packed in and perfectly dry.
"Make in the middle of this mass a hollow big enough to hold your casserole, covering it up with the cotton-wool, sawdust or hay -- cottonwool is really the best. Put whatever you want to cook into your casserole. Boil it on the fire for from 10 to 30 minutes, according to the nature of your food, then put it in your hat box, where it will cook as in the most expensive fireless cooker. Then go to your matinee.
"Mrs. Geisser says that you can leave it four hours without hurting the meat or stew. All the flavor is retained, for being hermetically sealed the juices are preserved." [Hermetic!]
"Boil the vegetables 10 to 15 minutes over the gas cooker or fire before putting into the hat box and keep them there for two hours. Potatoes should be 10 minutes on fire and one hour in hat box, she thinks, and dried chestnuts 20 minutes on fire and two and a half hours in hat box.
"Mrs. Geisser calculates that even with the hardest foodstuffs her system saves you from 30 to 50 percent of firing. Food keeps hot for 10 hours in the box.
"The idea has so taken the Turin housewives that hundreds of families are now using it. A local cookery school gives free lessons in the quickest way to turn hat boxes into fireless cookers. One woman discovered that the best way to close up the lid is to sew automatic buttons all around it." [Automatic ...? Maybe a progenitor of the zipper?]
"All fireless cookers on the market cost a lot of money. This one can be made by any practical woman for a few cents."
Amusing as that might be, another story in the same Gazette makes me wonder whether the Italian missus wasn't in fact forced to her invention. On Page 16, readers learned that homeowners and everyone else in Vienna, Austria, had been ordered to turn in all their cooking utensils and oven parts, down to the little weights on their food scales.
As the Great War ground on in Europe it turned plowshares and pruning hooks -- and baking pans and teapots -- into swords and spears.
Next week: Parrot Goes to His Death a Hero
ActiveStyle on 09/19/2016