Crock Pot Cholent

­

This overnight Jewish stew, is typically started on Friday afternoon and allowed to cook overnight to be eaten after temple on the Sabbath. So here is a modern slow cooker recipe of that vintage beef and bean delight. This is dedicated to a remarkable LGBT hero Jane Addams. Read more about this leader in a short story after the recipe.

Cholent is a flavorful, comfort food of beef, beans, potatoes, onions, honey and smoked paprika. If you observe this holiday, remember it starts on the 18^th!

Ingredients

• 1 can diced potatoes
• 1 medium onion, peeled and cut into 1½ inch chunks
• 4 lbs chuck roast cut into 1½ -inch chunks
• ¾ cup pearl barley
• 1 can kidney beans
• 1 can great northern beans
• ⅓ cup dried cranberries
• 4 cups beef broth (low salt)
• 2 tablespoons honey or maple syrup
• 2 tablespoons smoked paprika
• Salt to taste
• Pepper, to taste

Directions:

Wipe out the slow cooker and spray. 

Do your cutting: chop the onion and cut the meat into 1.5 to 2 inch pieces.

Line the bottom of a slow cooker with the potatoes, the onion and then the beef, sprinkling with salt, pepper, and paprika to taste.

Scatter the barley on top. 

Pour the beans on top. Sprinkle with dried cranberries, then pour on the broth and the honey or molasses. Sprinkle with the paprika and salt to taste. Add enough water to cover all the ingredients. 

Cook on low for 12 to 15 hours, stirring occasionally (except during Shabbat, for those who observe it), adding more water if necessary.

The longer the cholent cooks, the better it will be.

Cholent is the food of heaven,
Which the Lord Himself taught Moses
How to cook, when on that visit
To the summit of Mount Sinai…

Cholent is the pure ambrosia
That the food of heaven composes—
Is the bread of Paradise;
And compared with food so glorious…

From the poem Princess Sabbath by Heinrich Heine,
translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3KC_npe9zM

It is a delight to serve this stew that has stood the test of time to my wonderful Master Indy.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon

============================

Jane Addams

Jane Addams is regarded as the mother of American social work. She and her partner Ellen Star opened the famous Hull House together in Chicago which provided services and a sense of community to struggling European immigrants.

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a peace activist and a leader of the settlement house movement in America. As one of the most distinguished of the first generation of college-educated women, she rejected marriage and motherhood in favor of a lifetime commitment to the poor and social reform. Inspired by English reformers who intentionally resided in lower-class slums, Addams, along with Ellen Starr, moved in 1889 into an old mansion in an immigrant neighborhood of Chicago. Hull-House remained Addams’s home for the rest of her life and became the center of an experiment in philanthropy, political action and social science research.

Early Life & Education

Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois in 1860. She was the eighth of nine children and was born with a spinal defect that hampered her early physical growth before it was rectified by surgery. She was the youngest born into a prosperous northern Illinois family of English-American descent which traced back to colonial Pennsylvania. By the time Addams was eight, four of her siblings had died: three in infancy and one at age 16. In 1863, when Addams was two years old, her mother, Sarah Addams, died while pregnant with her ninth child. Her father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who served in the Civil War and remained active in politics, though he was a miller by trade.

During her childhood, Addams had big dreams—to do something useful in the world. Interested in the poor from her reading of Dickens and she decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor.

Young Addams graduated as valedictorian of Rockford Female Seminary at age 17 in 1881. Her study of medicine was interrupted by ill health but she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B.A. However that summer, her father died unexpectedly from a sudden case of appendicitis. Each child inherited roughly $50,000 (equivalent to $1.3 million today).

It wasn’t until a trip to Europe at age 27 with paramour Ellen G. Starr that she visited a settlement house and realized her life’s mission of creating a settlement home in Chicago.

In 1889, Addams and Starr leased the home of Charles Hull in Chicago. The two moved in and began their work of setting up Hull House with the following mission: “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.”

Addams responded to the needs of the community by establishing a nursery, dispensary, kindergarten, playground, gymnasium and cooperative housing for young working women. As an experiment in group living, Hull-House attracted male and female reformers dedicated to social service. Addams always insisted that she learned as much from the neighborhood’s residents as she taught them.

The establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 forced the Hull House Association to relocate its headquarters. The majority of its original buildings were demolished, but the Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams.

Having quickly found that the needs of the neighborhood could not be met unless city and state laws were reformed, Addams challenged both the “boss” rule in the immigrant neighborhood of Hull-House and indifference to the needs of the poor in the state legislature. She was appointed to Chicago’s Board of Education in 1905 and helped found the Chicago school of Civics and Philanthropy before becoming the first female president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections.

Addams and other Hull-House residents sponsored legislation to abolish child labor, establish juvenile courts, limit the hours of working women, recognize labor unions, make school attendance compulsory and ensure safe working conditions in factories. The Progressive party adopted many of these reforms as part of its platform in 1912.

In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.

In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government," Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. Thus, these were matters of which women would have more knowledge than men, so women needed the vote to best voice their opinions.

She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities.

Addams publicized Hull-House and the causes she believed in by lecturing and writing. In her autobiography, 20 Years at Hull-House (1910), she argued that society should both respect the values and traditions of immigrants and help the newcomers adjust to American institutions.

Generally, Addams was close to a wide set of other women and was very good at eliciting their involvement from different classes in Hull House's programs. Nevertheless, throughout her life Addams did have significant romantic relationships with a few of these women, including Ellen Starr and Mary Rozet Smith.

Her relationships offered her the time and energy to pursue her social work while being supported emotionally and romantically. 

From her exclusively romantic relationships with women, she would most likely be described as a lesbian in contemporary terms.

Her first romantic partner was Ellen Starr, whom she met when both were students at Rockford Female Seminary. In 1889, both had visited Toynbee Hall together, and started their settlement house project, purchasing a house in Chicago.

Her second romantic partner was Mary Rozet Smith, who was financially wealthy and supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she shared a house. Historian Lilian Faderman wrote that Jane was in love and she addressed Mary as "My Ever Dear", "Darling" and "Dearest One", and concluded that they shared the intimacy of a married couple.

They remained together until 1934, when Mary died of pneumonia, after forty years together. It was said that, "Mary Smith became and always remained the highest and clearest note in the music that was Jane Addams' personal life".

Together they owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine. When apart, they would write to each other at least once a day – sometimes twice. Addams would write to Smith, "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death". The letters also show that the women saw themselves as a married couple: "There is reason in the habit of married folks keeping together", Addams wrote to Smith.

Anti-War Views

Because Addams was convinced that war sapped the reform impulse, encouraged political repression & benefited only munitions makers, she opposed World War I.

During the war she spoke throughout the country in favor of increased food production to aid the starving in Europe. After the armistice she helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president from 1919 until her death in 1935.

Vilified during World War I for her opposition to American involvement, a decade later, Addams had become a national heroine and Chicago’s leading citizen. In 1931, her long involvement in international efforts to end war was recognized when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Addams had a heart attack in 1926 and remained unwell for the rest of her life. She died of cancer on May 21, 1935. Thousands of people attended her funeral in the courtyard of Hull-House.

When Addams died, she was the best-known female public figure in the United States.

She is buried in her family’s plot in Cedarville Cemetery in Cedarvillle, Illinois.