Cottage: A Place, A Dish, A Lifestyle Nostalgia for Dinner, Anyone? By Cornelius O’Donnell
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find the term “cottage” to be super romantic. Do you? And it certainly has a Twin Tiers resonance when you realize just how many cottages surround our Finger Lakes and the rest of our area. And then there are the hunters’cabins and small postWWII abodes that dot our landscape. I was reminded of this local cottage connection when I read a press release for a new book called Cottages for Every Season, Inspiring Homes with Classic Charm, by Cindy Cooper, published just last June by the 83Press, a boutique publisher affiliated with Hoffman Publishing out of Birmingham, Alabama. I searched further and found the same author published Country Cottage, Relaxed Elegance to Rustic Charm in 2018. Seems Ms. Cooper is the editor of the Cottage Journal magazine. I learned from their site that each issue “contains the most delicious recipes and menus,” as well as easy entertaining ideas. Right up my alley. During the months of quarantine, have you looked around your place and thought
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it might be a good move to upgrade the premises or even move to something a little more suitable for your current situation? I think a browse in the Hoffman output might be a “good thing.” My Brush with Cottages I think I realize why that word makes me feel good. Way way back, my grandmother lived in an apartment close to the Poe Cottage (as in Edgar Allen) that was situated on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It was real country when Poe was around. Invariably we’d mosey over there to play. (It is still there, I bet.) Then we moved from the Bronx to Queens and into one of those cottage-like (small) Tudors—brick, stone, slate roof, oak doors, and a large leaded-glass picture window with tiny insets of stained glass. (But small.) Then it was on to Syracuse when I was in the third grade. A classmate of mine had a dad who ran The Cottage Bakery in that city. I remember those large black and white
cookies his mother kept on hand for her son’s friends. We lived in a house (not a cottage) across from the gardens at Burnett Park (on a good day we could hear the animals up the hill and over at the zoo). But I remember cottage-sized places amidst the two-story houses on Tipperary Hill, where the green stoplight was above the red! A few years later we moved to the Albany area and would visit lakeside cottages in East Berne on Warner’s Lake, stopping for fried clams on the way at a place called Neil’s. No relation, but good memories. I still remember family friends had a rental with the main room lit by a chandelier formed from an old wagon wheel fitted with light bulbs illuminating the knotty pine. A decorating cliché then, and now, perhaps. When I started my career at Corning, I’d work closely with the company’s Canadian division based in Toronto. I learned that hordes of people would decamp to “the cottage” on weekends. It’s a way of life for so
