syllabub: words on food

Prunes

2009-05-18T05:58:00.036-04:00

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own begins with lunch. Novelists, she observes, might write about meals, but “seldom spare a word for what was eaten.” So she furnishes her meditation on education and living in the margin with an extended description of dining at a men’s college. She revels in the radiant, animating provisions set before the men, the serenity of the fish dish, the poise of the sauces, the rise and sparkling fall of desert. Good food fuels a casual, naturalised intellectual bonhomie amongst the fellows:

“And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself . . . how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.”

But Woolf, of course, must rouse herself from the upholstery of male fellowship and trudge her way back to the women’s college. And the dinner that awaits her there casts a pall. Set on obtuse china, the fare is dull and muddy – insipid soup, yellowed vegetables, dry beef and biscuits. The final insult is the pudding:

“Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune . . . One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

Most outcast fruit, the prune! Woolf assaults it with a scorn borrowed from the boniest schoolmistress. The fricatives and plosives of her derision – the same mouth shapes as spitting out pits – are saved for this fruit, as an emblem of the dried and withered place of women in education. Girls are fed on dreary food and drearier thought, both provided by women – governesses and headmistresses – who themselves are overlooked, overcooked, overripe – spinsters, maiden aunts. They are Prunes. Educated women are cut off – cut themselves off! - from the succulent, the affable, the luminous dining table. Virginia Woolf is right: privilege smells, feels and tastes different to privation. She is right, too, that our very being is formed from within our gut: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” But is she right that “The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes?”

It is certainly no easy task to rescue the prune, for its degradation has been a long time in the making. Stewed prunes have suffered from a forced association with institutions of discipline. Their affiliation is with the thick-lipped – but somehow always chipped – china bowls of the school, the boarding house and the nursing home. These houses of shrivel stored prunes in dusty tins the size of Gladstone bags. When finally released, the prunes were the colour of cockroaches and smelled thinly of death and dustballs. They leaked their embalming fluids into the thin, livid yellow custard in which they were always served. And worst of all, we who were served these prunes knew, with precision, that they were sent to discipline us. From the inside, out.

For it has to be admitted: the stewed prune was conscripted by the regiment of women who knew “what's best for you” and had seized on the bowel as their territory. These enforcers– the nurse, the nanny, the sports mistress, the hair-netted dinner lady – took charge of your insides with a noxious mix of no-nonsense affect and shaming euphemism. Accompanied by the whiff of disinfectant, brusque insinuations of “regularity” and “movements” turned the poor prune into a purgative.

The prune, then, is prim and it is puckered. In Little Dorrit, de facto governess Mrs General recommends that her charge says “papa” rather than “father,” augmenting her advice with a little elocution exercise: “Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company or on entering a room, ‘Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, prunes and prism.’” This is Dickens engaging in the ready sport of governess-baiting. Mrs General’s advice on how to properly pronounce the name of the father, inadvertently shapes the girls’ lips into pursed and pretty sphincters – her lessons in prunish prudery turn her girls into kissable (if nuttily muttering) bits of skirt. And so it was that the banal prune was yoked to the flashing prism, all under the sign of propriety. In the twinkling of a bedpost “prunes and prisms” passed into literary idiom, an easy way to catch women between the rock of sedimented virginity and the hard place of harlotry. D.H. Lawrence – scholarship boy and one-time junior clerk at a surgical appliances factory – mocks a character for her “‘prunes-and-prisms’ manner” and when Jo in Little Women yearns to be a boy and run away with Teddy and “have a capital time,” she breaks off and moans “’Prunes and prisms’ are my doom.” Since she is a girl, she must be “proper” and “stop at home.” Oscar Wilde’s governess Miss Prism may be missing her prunes (and her 3-volume novel), but her easily mocked high-tones remain.

Dickens – that rag and bone man – didn’t invent the prunish woman. The old maid was a figure of fun long before he steamed into print. And if we unflinchingly follow the history of the prune, it turns out that it was once associated with the oldest of “maids.” Behind the prune-wielding disciplined ranks of the governess, the nurse and the headmistress, lounges the most venerable professional woman of them all: the whore. We still sometimes call a brothel a “stew” and it is because of the innocuous stewed prune. A 1612 collection of satirical poems called The Knave of Hearts features a whoring knave who takes “Burnt wine, stew’d prunes, a punk to solace him.” And in a similar collection published a year earlier, The Knave of Spades, a wanton entices a young man into her house of vice:

“—He to his liquor falls
While she unto her maids for cakes,
Stew’d prunes, and pippins, calls.

Some scholars claim that dried cakes and stewed prunes were considered prophylactic against the pox and used as prescriptions for syphilitics. But whatever the reason, most scholars who interest themselves in Ladies of the Night agree that a bowl of prunes was the trading sign of a brothel. In Wit’s Miserie, or the World’s Madnesse (1596), Thomas Lodge says of a bawd, "you shall know her dwelling by a dish of stewd pruins in the window, and two or three fleering wenches sit knitting or sewing in her shop.” And Shakespeare goes to town on prunes and brothels. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Master Slender pleads lack of appetite for food and women, claiming sexual mishap has put him out of action: “I bruised my shin th' other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence; three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes; and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.” And in Measure for Measure, a play which gleefully compromises attempts at astringent morality, Shakespeare gets right to it and relishes the visual pun between the creased, globular fruit and a pair of bollocks nestled in a certain kind of “dish” – Elbow’s wife is led into a brothel by her craving for prunes. Pompey explains to the law that she was “great with child, and longing,—saving your honour’s reverence,—for stewed prunes. Sir, we had but two in the house, which at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-dish, a dish of some three-pence; your honours have seen such dishes; they are not China dishes, but very good dishes.”

Our post-industrial association of the prune with dour desiccation is a mean-spirited corruption of earlier ages’ earthy and bawdy prune play. A prune can be more than a faded plum. Juicy and vital and a little sultry with fruit-sugars, it might never intend you to remember the plum. This prune is bold, not grudging or grasping. Preserved into opulence, it pleases itself. It doesn’t mourn or imitate its juvenile state, but, flashing black as the pupil of your eye, transforms it into something else again. It is as scented and reflective as tobacco, and it takes you from the schoolroom to the brothel and all regions between and beyond.

This prune, the prune of my dreams, met me recently in France. I had been happily invited along on a women’s college alumnae tour of the Dordogne Valley. These were women reconvening after time in the full glow of life, and together we spent an idyllic week of food, wine and conversation. The Dordogne lays an expansive, seasoned table for its guests. Its culinary specialties are mostly dark and unctuous: duck, goose, foie gras, truffles and walnut oil. It is food that takes time to prepare, and time to eat; it eases the clockworks of conversation back to a sauntering pace, and doctors, lawyers, senators and novelists found themselves suffused in the lamplight of conviviality. A linguist gnawed on yet another leg of duck confit as she explained to an enthralled audience the symbolism of the string skirts worn by such well-fed prehistoric beauties as the Venus of Willendorf; a casual mention of lace elicited an impromptu lesson on “death bobbins,” whittled by the makers of filigree to commemorate the execution of bloodthirsty murderers; a porcelain expert, class of 1950, fois gras trembling on the end of her fork, described how she once landed a distressed hot air balloon on a boat in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. By day, our bus wove across a region made of castles and cliff-dwellings, rich furrowed soil and corrugated precipices. We trekked into painted caves where tens of thousands of years ago bears bedded down together and, upon waking, flexed and sharpened their claws on the walls, carving a tally of another year. The folds and creases of the landscape accommodated this group brought together by friendship and education, by plenty, by loss, and by the diverse pleasures of society of one’s kind.

Across the course of seven breakfasts, seven lunches and seven dinners, no one ever set a prune before us. Virginia Woolf’s algorithm of food and education and sex had been inverted, and I had eaten her boys’ meal with girls. But I wasn’t happy about the still sacrificed prune, that third sex. So on Saturday morning I said a quick goodbye to the breakfasting sisterhood and set out with an empty bag and my dubious French at the ready. It was market day in Sarlat and I found the glorious Agen pruneaux, outside the hotel doors, in the bustle of narrow cobbled streets. A valley away from the Dordogne, Agen is the cradle of prune civilization. The jet-black fruits are made from the Ente plum, and their sweetness comes from being tree-matured and carefully dried to preserve their sugars. I had heard of these prunes – even tasted what I knew to be an over-dried specimen in England – and I was determined to load my suitcase with the genuine fleshy gems. I made my way between stalls groaning with sausages, fish, mustards, oils, vegetables, cheeses, strawberries . . . until finally I found, in the shadow of the old church, a stand full of the treasured prunes – ranked in size, labeled by humidity. They glistened under the quiet husbandry of a gentleman dressed in a plum coloured stripy sweater and plum coloured corduroy trousers, his scholarly face tilted over his produce, as if listening to them. I bought many bags from Monsieur Pruneaux, and then sought out a quiet stretch of medieval wall to sit on.

Solemnly, I dipped into my treasure. The prunes were so tender that the pits slid silkily from the flesh, and the flesh itself was almost cucumber green against the purple-turned-to-carbon- skins. They were tense and then yielding to the teeth, and they tasted of seasons turned, of nightfall. The flavour was as broad as a thumb, but bright too. Each small parcel had enfolded its sugars and its sunlight, and compressed them like coal. I brought the prunes back to the hotel and fed some to my new friends, and then watched as their faces registered the marvel: this is a prune?!

B and I ate most of the prunes straight from the bag across that week and on the long train ride back north, a thoughtful chew and an archaic smile their only condiment. But once back in London I wanted to make a prunes and custard dish that both redeemed and paid homage to the ridiculed genre of prunishness. I began with the idea of a clafoutis – a simple French dish of baked custard and fruit. The name of this dish might, some think, find its origin in the word meaning “to fill up, to stuff.” But other sources suggest a root meaning “to affix with nails.” Since clafoutis is most commonly made with cherries which film over with a skin of custard and bleed slightly as they cook, I’m convinced of the latter meaning – surely the dish acquired its name because it looks like stigmata? But mine would be made with prunes, and there is a Breton version of the clafoutis, slightly sturdier in consistency, made with prunes. It is called a “far Breton.” I decided to follow a “far” recipe, but borrow a little something from the clafoutis, too. In a clafoutis, it is traditional to leave the stones in the cherries, to impart a hint of almond flavour to the pudding. I thought I could mimic this, and get something of a brothelly “to stuff” meaning in my prunes – by removing their pits and replacing them with a nub of marzipan. In Far Breton and similar dishes, the prunes are sometimes soaked in tea or Armagnac to plump them up. My prunes had no need of such hydration, but it would be a shame to spurn spirits altogether, especially since I had taken care to procure a small bottle of Prune D’Ente eau de vie from the Sarlat market. So I added a generous tablespoon to my batter.

My final ingredient was a smuggled one. Before taking the train down to the Dordogne, B and I had eaten in a small Paris bistro. The crème brûlée we ate was scented, our menu said, with “Tonka.” The caramelized custard had a warm, round flavour, brown as leather. When we asked what “Tonka” is, the chef emerged from the kitchen (in a natty track suit) and presented us with a dark, hard, wrinkled bean. He left us the tactile little stone, which B put in her pocket and brought back to our London kitchen. It was an illicit trafficking. The tonka seed is toxic in large doses and is banned in England. Most compelling for my purposes of helping my prunes masquerade as cherries whose stones masquerade as almond, tonka is sometimes used in place of another forbidden flavour – bitter almond, favoured by suicides. We risked our livers, but tonka added the flavour of defection to my prunes and custard. You have to transgress, masquerade as what you might become, and damage yourself a little or maybe even a lot in order to steal the lighted lamp.

SYLLABUS: FAR BRETON

3 large eggs
2 cups (475ml) whole milk
½ cup (113g) sugar
½ grated tonka bean, or seeds from ½ a vanilla pod, or ¼ tsp vanilla essence
1/8 tsp salt
1 tablespoon prune eau de vie, or Armagnac
5 tblsp (71g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
¾ cup (94g) flour
1 ½ cup (300g) pitted prunes
enough marzipan (or brandied marzipan) to stuff prunes – about 150g
If necessary, 1 cup hot tea, or ¼ cup Armagnac plus ¼ cup water for soaking liquid
Icing/confectioner’s sugar for dusting

Put eggs, milk, sugar, tonka/vanilla, salt and melted butter in a blender or food processor and whiz to blend for about 1 min. Sift in the flour and pulse the batter several times. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, preferably 3, overnight even better. (The batter should last several nights in a fridge.)

If soaking your prunes, put in heatproof bowl and pour over the hot tea or the Armagnac and water mix that you’ve warmed together. Cover and let stand.

Centre a rack in the oven and preheat oven to 375F/190C. Butter an 8x2 inch round cake pan or deep quiche dish and dust the pan with flour, tapping out the excess. Do not use a loose-bottomed pan. Put pan on baking sheet.

Drain prunes from their soaking liquid, discarding the remaining liquid (or better still, drinking it). If your prunes have pits, slice them open with a small sharp knife and remove pit. Tear off enough marzipan to roll into a nugget that will fit inside the prune. Tuck the marzipan inside the prune, closing the skin over it. Repeat until you have a plateful of stuffed prunes.

Remove batter from fridge, add the eau de vie or Armagnac, and whisk it lightly to reblend, then rap the pitcher against the counter to break the top bubbles. Pour batter slowly and gently into the pan, trying not to incorporate more air, and then drop in the prunes, distributing them evenly.

Bake for 50-60 mins or until top of cake is puffed quite high, has turned brown and a knife comes out clean. If the pudding browns too quickly, turn the oven down or even off and leave inside for the full cooking time. Transfer to cooling rack and cool to room temp.

You can now serve this straight from its dish, or attempt to unmould it. It will be fragile – only unmould if you have baked it in the right depth of pan, and if the bottom doesn’t seem to have stuck. Have a serving plate at hand. Run a blunt knife around the edges to loosen. Dust the top of the pudding with confectioner’s/icing sugar, then cover with a piece of parchment or wax paper. Place an upside down rack over the paper and invert the whole thing to turn the cake out onto the rack. Then quickly re-invert onto the serving plate. Redust with confectioner’s/icing sugar if necessary.

A is for Apple

2009-01-04T19:52:00.029-05:00

A is for Apple. B is for Burgle. C is for Chomp. And D – consequently – is for Do a Runner. I recently visited an English Stately Home and I acquired a small souvenir. Englishness and stateliness tend to make my fingers itch . . . and so, ever so rarely, I am the agent of just a little misappropriation.

It was a long-legged sort of Sunday afternoon, and B and I drifted into a plan to take the kind of walk that has a grand old house at the end of it. Poking around the houses of people richer than yourself is a pastime beloved by the English; we are a persistently evaluative people, and we have a peculiar attachment to being hushed, to hushing others, to peering at while being peered upon. We pay good money to make Sunday visits to the houses that most of us, in another age, would have spent our lives working in and around.

In another time, serving the warp and weft of wealth upholstered the conviction that the steward can be as sovereign (in his own way) as the lord of the manor. We tell lots of stories in which the butler or the valet not only waits on but quietly compensates for the failings of his boorish betters, and these stories seed the English belief that service is the best way of knowing (and thereby upholding) refinement. It was the draper who really understood quality cloth, a housekeeper was more au fait than anyone with good china and the chambermaid most intimately knew the literal underpinnings of the better classes. These workers were granted their own domains; and they believed they had a kind of dustcloth ownership that lightly overlay the real tenacities of English property rights. The cook of long-standing, born on the estate, raised up through its servile ranks, may have been said to rule the roost, and be deferred to; she even recreated the hierarchies of upstairs in her downstairs world. Now her descendants, myself included, enjoy a little snoop around the old architectures of a class-system that haunts us, with that particular combination of thrill and horror that constitutes all desires, good and bad, including hunger.

Although few cooks or gardeners or maids serve estates these days, the roots of that culture still entangle the soil, and its hoary old stumps are putting up new shoots. New shoots that make my fingers itch. In England, His Majesty, the monarch-in-waiting, will famously neither smile on modern architects, nor eat asparagus out of season. The excellencies of smallholding are lucratively championed by a mop-haired toff with the kind of double-barreled surname derived not from experiments in gender equity, but from age-old practices of estate preservation. The “domestic goddess” who sheds her grace upon all Yummy Mummies is the daughter of the Tory who held the purse strings under Margaret Thatcher. Though the Iron Lady herself is not really a lady but an eagle-eyed server - a grocer’s daughter. At some point during the 11 bleak years of her reign, I heard a radio interview with a woman who had grown up alongside Thatcher in Grantham, and because I only truly understand anything when it is described culinarily, the story has stayed with me as the most succinct explanation of Thatcher’s particular Will to Power. Back in the day, the interviewee’s mother would send her round to the Thatcher grocery. “Make sure the other sister serves you,” her mother would warn as the child set off with the string bag, “Margaret always keeps one finger on the scales.”

This is the long and knavish way around the short and brutish fact that I stole an apple. B and I had tramped across London to visit a gracious house, one that was built in the country, but now finds itself in the city. The magma of new growth encroaches on its space, held back only by some sturdy railings and the even sturdier intent of several elderly volunteer ladies sporting sprigged outfits and accents to match. B and I slipped into the seeming requisite of restrained, intentional gestures and we padded through the house progressively more dazed by room after room of glassed-in hoards of porcelain miniatures, then were startled from our torpor by other rooms peopled with life–sized muslin-faced manikins dressed as Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Finally the house gently excreted us into the garden. It was walled, its high brick walls host to much green clambering, thick wisteria trunks like bandy avuncular legs supporting a tumbling scramble of nieces and nephews. The garden had elevated walkways, lined with lavender bushes, roses turned to hips, and deep, dark green banks of leaves sexy with the promise of peonies in the summer. This formal space raised and lowered you, depositing you at benches with views and suggested a circuit through its loveliness. In one of its walls was a small doorframe and if you ducked through it, another vegetal plane opened out before you. This was the kitchen garden, and the working garden, too. It held the mulch piles, the greenhouses and the potting areas. Its vegetable beds were perfect operas of bulb and foliage: full-chested leeks with cavalier greenery, tremulous forests of dill, unearthed onions looking indolent and faintly lewd, carrots poking up just enough to see what was going on, and then signs of tragic decline all around – asparagus beds gone to full late-season battiness, the overlooked courgettes turning to bloated, basso marrows. It was a glory.

But beyond this again was the true temptation. Yet another little door opened into a small music-box of an orchard. Just about a dozen apple trees, of a dozen or so varieties, all agreeably short and all ornamented with fruit. Each one was carefully labeled with varietal and the date that the apples would be ripe for picking, and each and every one had its own stern sign that said “DO NOT PICK THE FRUIT.” The torture! I lost myself walking between them, heavy boughs nudging their pendant crop against my shoulders. Wandering in a sun and apple-spangled daze, I bumped into B salivating under an “early picking Discovery.” Its hundred happy red apples were clearly perfect that day, that very moment, that second and that second alone they were at their best. It was TIME. We discussed the exact wording of the signs – what would constitute “picking,” exactly? If we clasped our hands behind our backs and simply bobbed for the apples, could we - in all fairness - be stopped? If one of us stumbled against the tree, and the other was lying underneath that tree with her mouth – at that moment – happening to be wide open, would any Newtonian consequences be held against us?

Such pussy footing around the problem was all very pleasurable, but no substitute for the real thing. So I plucked an apple, popped it into my bag and quickly led B away from stateliness and the no-doubt swift-footed justice of the volunteer ladies. Out of the orchard, through the walled graciousness, emerging onto the street through a tradesman’s entrance, we trotted down the hill to the wail of London traffic.

There is a definite relation between the apple specifically and such theft. There is a kind of obviousness to it, and even a name for it: scrumping. You can probably scrump all kinds of fruit and veg, but scrump is a West Country name for a small or scrubby apple and “scrumpy” is the name given to cider pressed from foraged apples. The apple is portable enough to be downfall and salvation too. There is always Eve, bless her, and then John Clare remembered the redeeming virtues of the fruit when he recalled the Golden Russet that grew in his father’s garden: “the tree is an old favourite with my father and stood his friend many a year in the days of adversity by producing an abundance of fruit which always met with ready sale and paid his rent.” But what if the apple in question grows in someone else’s walled garden? What if it is not for sale or rent but simply comes to hand? . . . well, as Clare said:

All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes.

My petty theft made no dent to law and its enclosures. I am not a bona fide poacher nor a leveler, sad to say. Nevertheless, I was set on honouring the pilfered apple. I have always been wary of recipes that ask you to actually heat apples, feeling that a fresh apple is the most perfectly hand-ready fruit, best when shockingly crisp.
Why do anything at all to it? A friend and I recently confessed our mutual contempt for the baked apple as a form, and the way it renders the handsome sphere to a secret and miserable mush within its own jacket. And as for the habit of hurling huge quantities of cinnamon at any apple that moves – I throw my hands up in horror. I have many exceptions to my own rule: tarts, charlottes and dutch apple pies. In fact, I admit (with the exception of the cinnamon bit) it’s no rule at all. But still, when you’ve slyly pocketed an apple at its peak, contravened the pleas of its mindful gardeners, misbehaved in a “lawful orchard” – that’s the time to institute your own edict, lay it down as law inviolable, and defend it vigorously. This apple would not be cooked. It would instead be met by its equal – a mature and friable cheddar. A cheese like this might be subject to the same kind of law that I apply to the apple: best left unmolested, its musty, woody tang the perfect complement to the apple’s bright snap. But contrarily I was in the mood for something baked, something flaky, something that left a buttery, guilty residue on my fingertips.

I wanted something like a cheese straw, only more robust and less pointy. Something with simple ingredients, but an able foil to the fruit. When you cut an apple the wrong way, along its equator, it reveals five carpels arranged in a five-point star, each containing a few mahogany pips. It’s a queer sort of compass, and one I thought I could carry over into my pastry by using nigella – the onion seed, not the goddess. I folded these angular black kernels into my rich pastry, then rolled it thinly and cut it into leaves, as a vague and stylised reuniting, a return of the apple to the tree.

SYLLABUS: CHEESE AND ONION SCRUMPS
Makes about 18

100g very cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks
100g plain flour
A hefty pinch of salt
1⁄2 tsp mustard powder
50g mature cheddar, coarsely grated
50g Parmesan cheese, finely grated
1-2 tablespoons of black onion seeds
1 egg yolk, beaten

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Place the butter and flour in the bowl of a food processor, together with the salt, mustard, the two cheeses and the egg yolk. Pulse in short spurts. Once the texture is clumpy, tip it all out on to some plastic wrap and knead it through the plastic (to prevent melting the fats) until blended and smooth. With the plastic wrap holding it all together, roll into a log. Then shape the log into a teardrop about 4-5cm diameter and press the ends flat. Chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes – you could leave it overnight.

When you are ready to bake them, grease a baking sheet, or line with a Silpat. Dip a sharp knife into a mug of hot water and slice thin biscuits from the log. Place on a baking tray about 2cm apart and use a knife to score veins into each leaf. Bake for 10 minutes, or until golden and crisp. Lift off the tray using a pallet knife and cool on a rack.

Brandy Snaps

2008-08-02T18:02:00.066-04:00

I've decided to apprentice myself to the arts of pliancy. Quiet habits of severity have edged into my life. Which is not to say that all severe habits are bad. I expressly cultivate some, like teatime, and I find them to be sources of great pleasure. Strong tea, made of just boiling water and steeped for precisely four minutes in a pre-warmed pot, then consumed at 5 o’clock along with one too many biscuits, makes a happy moratorium to the workday. But there are other, perhaps equally English habits of judgment or complaint, that can turn a life just a little bit brittle. Institutions and corporations – both the labours of inhabiting them and the labours of avoiding them – have taken the bend straight out of me. I want to restore the pleasures and the ethics of laxity. So I made Brandy Snaps.

It might be objected that anything snappish is the exact opposite of anything pliant. True. But the glossy honeycombed tube known as the Brandy Snap, which shatters under the edge of a fork, paradoxically springs from viscous ingredients, and owes its rigid shape to a phase of lollopy malleability. Brandy Snap batter is made from a melt of butter and sugar and syrup, and the tunnel shapes are formed by wrapping warm-from-the-oven tuiles around the handle of a wooden spoon. And anyway, I have a peculiar association of this treat with bendability. As a child I loved the Brandy Snap, and would watch eagerly for the slim, cellophaned box of them to be lodged in a high-up cupboard, “in case,” my mother said, “of guests.” But the goodies bestowed upon guests did not always trickle down the food chain to me. So after what seemed like weeks of waiting for the occasion when I might taste a Snap, I decided to hasten things along a bit. I reasoned that if I breached the cupboard, and sabotaged the wrapping on the box, the row of crisp Snaps inside would go soft. Ruined, the softened Snaps were more likely to be put into my, as opposed to adult, hands. My plan worked perfectly, and more than once. Having successfully clambered up onto a counter and effected some quiet perforations a couple of times, I developed a taste for the toffeed suppleness of the snapless Snap. Being an agent of wilt in my otherwise regulated household taught me something about manipulating the passing point between two opposed states – and the pleasures of riding exactly that crest.

I remember that once or twice we made, rather than bought, Brandy Snaps. The kitchen became deliciously fuddled by warm butter and sugar, and an assembly line – consisting of me and my younger brother – was arranged. The secret to a good brandy snap is timing, and you learn this timing through repetition. The batter should be spread thinly into as perfect a circle as possible, but not so thinly that there are any holes in the slick, raw surface. They should be baked until they bubble and just – only just – darken. As they cook, the smooth rounds become as lacy as doilies. Then you and your palate knife must wait until they are cool enough to hold together, but not so firm that they refuse to be curled. This can all be described at length, but there’s no substitute for making a large batch and learning as you go. Brandy Snaps demand knack from their cook, but unlike many a baked goody, they also offer the benevolence of a second chance: if you let them cool too long, you can pop them back in the oven for a few minutes and they will once again become game for all manner of shaping.

The Brandy Snap is tubular, but if you drape the warm rounds over a mould such as a drinking glass, or even (as I once did) a can of baked beans, they make excellent baskets for filling with ice-cream.
In my youth there was no such high falutin’ deviation: my brother and I lined up to turn the Snaps around the handles of wooden spoons, pressing our thumbs on the overlap to weld the join, then gently extracting the spoon handle. (That these same spoons were once or twice swatted against our bottoms for misbehaviour lent a little menace to the business – though to our great glee and eternal triumph, a spoon once snapped in two when it hit the doorframe instead of the small behind disappearing around it.) You had to then cradle the delicate Snap as if it were a cocoon, and transport it to a cooling rack to fully set. Soon every surface in the kitchen would be covered in piles of these vacant treats and they would be tucked away in old but airtight biscuit tins, waiting to be filled with piped cream - right before serving, of course, in case they softened.

My fondness for the Brandy Snap has much to do with its constitutive and reversible shifts of form. Now I learn that this trickery is part of its history as well as its physiognomy. The Brandy Snap has pulled the ultimate identity trick on us. In 1854 George Read published The Complete Biscuit and Gingerbread Baker’s Assistant, a charming little book furnished with an equally charming subtitle: Practical Directions for making all kinds of plain and fancy biscuits, buns, cakes, drops, muffins, crumpets, gingerbread, spice nuts, etc. Adapted for the trade or for private families. The only work exclusively on this subject. In a section that promises, among other things, to teach us about Brandy Snaps, Master Read instructs the trade or private family cook that “When they are baked and a little cool, cut them from the tins, by passing a thin knife under them; turn them, whilst warm, in the form of a cone, the same as the grocers make up their sugar papers, or turn them round a stick as the last. If they should get too cold to turn, put them again into the oven to warm.” So far, so good – all this had been passed down to me without benefit of book learning. But his last sentence in this entry is a shocker: “Brandy Snaps are the same as these, without being turned.” The Snap, it seems, was originally flat!

Theodore Francis Garrett, writing a little later in 1898 in his 12 volume Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery, addresses the confusion: “Brandy Snaps are sometimes confounded with Jumbles, but these have a distinctive characteristic, in that they are curled round the finger or a stick before cooling, while Brandy Snaps are flat – a distinction that can only be appreciated by the young. See JUMBLES.” What we call Brandy Snaps were originally Jumbles, which we would know had we not yet again ignored the chubby-kneed vehemence of young persons. My guess is that the Brandy Snap was metamorphosed when it changed hands not only between young and old, but also between working and middle classes, and from street vendor to factory worker. Treats like snaps and gingerbreads – in the form of ginger nuts, or gingerbread people – were originally bought at fairs, bitten into in the street, or taken home as penny-cheap tokens of a day of fun. Garrett is both wistful and snobbish as he notes that “These delights of our youth were probably originally made with a Brandy flavouring as one of their ingredients; but with that lack of discriminative taste peculiar to uneducated palates, the presence of the Brandy flavour was not sufficiently appreciated to render its presence essential to the success of the manufacture; hence, as the “snaps” could be made cheaper without Brandy, and yielded more sweets for the same money, the spirituous prefix became but a name.” I, of course, would be adding the spirits right back in.

But if liquor can be abandoned, an absolutely key ingredient in Brandy Snaps (and the reason most Americans don’t make them) is one of the oldest industrial food products around: Golden Syrup. Alright, I suppose treacle would work, or even that abomination, corn syrup -- but Golden Syrup, with its mild caramel flavour, is just perfect. I recently unearthed a cache of Golden Syrup in my basement. One of the curious features of being expatriate is my tendency to hoard. I haul suitcases of food products back with me from the Mother Land, then cherish them in my basement until their expiration date looms (or passes). Then I subject my household to days on end of beans on toast, or pickled walnuts, or, in the case of a stash of Golden Syrup, endless puddings and biscuits of the sweetest, most nurseryish sort.

Like so many of its industrial descendants, Golden Syrup is a commercial product that mimics a natural one – it is a by-product of sugar refining, and was originally marketed as poor-man’s honey. The tin has not changed since the nineteenth century: amidst flourishes of green and gold, it bears a logo that confounds syrup with honey via the citation of a biblical riddle. This logo is a prostrate lion, over which hovers a swarm of bees. The inscription reads: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” It comes from a story about Samson, better known for his disastrous haircut. Before he was transformed from strong to weak with a wifely snip of the shears, Samson fancied a comely lass from the unsuitable, unsnipped (in another way) ranks of the Philistines. On his way to check out his ethnically troublesome girlfriend, he is attacked by a young lion, whom he rips apart as easily as if that lion were a kid goat. On a return visit, this time to marry the woman, Samson passes the now long-dead lion and sees that a swarm of bees have set up their hive in the carcass. The strong man snacks on the honey they are producing in that dark, satanic mill. Sweetness from strength, then, is honey from the lion. What proceeds from there in Samson’s story is an epic tangle of wedding feasting, in-law baiting, ethnic violence, wife-swapping and yet more ethnic violence, all rolled around Samson trying to score some nice wedding linens by using this riddle – how can sweetness come from strength? Despite the fact that he was clearly a prize ass, Samson always seemed an appealing figure to me. Perhaps it was his sweet tooth – for honey and foreign women – that pleased.

I thought I would blend a little Samsonian strength with the sweetness of Golden Syrup in my Brandy Snaps, so I added a fiery trace of black pepper. Visually too, I liked the idea of seeing flecks of pepper trapped in the caramel pores. When it came to it, there was no brandy in the house, but I had Grand Marnier in my sideboard. Since many Brandy Snap recipes use orange zest anyway, the citrus spirit would get two jobs done at once. To echo the Grand Marnier, I laced my filling – a mix of crème fraiche and marscapone – with some orange flower water.

But the colours were too bland, and the taste too harmonious. As a final touch, I reached for strawberries, just in season and perfectly red. The colour would gladden the eye, and the bright acidity would cut across the sweetness of the Snap, stinging the taste buds. Black pepper makes an excellent condiment for strawberries, and they blend with orange smoothly. The berries formed a thematic fit, too. Just as Samson’s encounter with honey on his way to visit his Philistine bit of skirt ends up destroying his marriage, strawberries centre another story of forbidden and ultimately tragic cross-racial passion. When jealous Iago sets Othello against Desdemona, he provides “ocular proof” of her supposed infidelity by producing her handkerchief. This handkerchief is the first gift Othello gave Desdemona, and it is “spotted” with strawberries. In choosing this design for the condemnatory linen, Shakespeare was drawing on a tradition of figuring the strawberry as akin to the snake - both are seductive denizens of the low-growing grass – and another tradition which associated the fruit with the Virgin Mary, as a symbol of purity and humility (again, the low grass). Othello, Desdemona and her handkerchief become players in the usual hopscotch of whether women should be voluptuous or virtuous, and of course tragic ends await everyone. Just like in the Samson story, all is lost to quick and brittle passions. In both tales wedding linens, misplaced rage, cross-racial desire, and political intrigue drive the heroes to - in each case - murder and suicide. And at the heart of each of these stories, sweet foods are riddles that twist and twist again - the strong men bait their traps with honey and strawberries, only to be caught in their own snares.

But (and this digression continues only because I am apprenticing myself to elasticity), I take particular pleasure in Desdemona’s handkerchief, because it is a wonderful portrait of the torment of the lost item. As someone who was once sent to school with a large sign pinned to her jumper that read “FIND LOST MITTEN,” I feel catharsis in following the guilt trip that Othello lays on Desdemona about the mislaid handkerchief. Othello pretends to have the sniffles and casually asks Desdemona if he can borrow her hankie. Desdemona clearly has no idea where the hankie is, and starts bluffing furiously about having it safe and sound somewhere. Othello then launches into a description of the thumping preciousness of the thing. He begins by describing how this first love-gift of his is in fact a re-gifting. And here is where the story gets good. It was given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian woman of mystical powers, who had said that if Mum ever lost it or gave it away, her marriage would crumple and her husband would stray. When Othello’s mother (clearly having kept her hankie drawer and her marriage safe and sound all her living days) is dying, she bequeaths it to Othello, telling him to pass it on to his own wife. Not only is the hankie his dead mother's – a burden of guilt overwhelming enough – but the very warp and weft of the thing is saturated with the sweet smoky scent of generations of women who have smugly immolated themselves upon the altar of marital fidelity and domestic rectitude. Othello invokes the guilt trip, but the guilt itself is stitched and restitched in scarlet thread by women, against women, and there ain’t nothing like it:

'Tis true: there's magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.

Losing your husband’s dead mother’s handkerchief, a handkerchief sewn by a 200-year old prophetess, of silk spun by holy silkworms, and coloured with a dye wrung from the mummified hearts of virgins – that all puts a lost-and-never-found mitten into perspective. Though my mother did knit it . . .

And so I curl around the wooden spoon, back to where I began. It is all a lesson, literary and culinary, in the course of pliancy I have set myself. I lost a mitten once, and there are many other things I have lost – squandered, even. I am very good at counting wrongs and losses, wrongs and losses as sticky as Golden Syrup, and as plentiful as the seeds in a strawberry. I am good at it, but I am trying to bend – or maybe snap? – away from that particular talent. If you want to keep counting, you may. But if you want to wave aside infidelities and transgressions real or imagined, and taste instead the sweetness that is released by shatter, and seasoned by pliancy, you may rather.

SYLLABUS: BLACK PEPPER BRANDY SNAPS WITH ORANGE AND STRAWBERRIES

Makes approximately 30 biscuits

Ingredients

100g/4oz butter
100g/4oz caster sugar
100g/4oz golden syrup
100g/4oz plain flour, sifted
1 tablespoon Grand Marnier
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
pinch of salt

150g/6oz mascarpone
150g/6oz crème fraiche
orange flower water to taste
one pint strawberries
mint sprigs for decoration

Heat the butter, sugar, syrup, lemon juice and Grand Marnier gently together in a saucepan until the butter melts and the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat, mix in the flour and leave to cool.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350F/Gas 4, line 2 baking trays with non-stick baking paper with 6 circles of about 5 cm marked on them, with good space between each. Alternatively, place this template under a Silpat – the circles will show through and you can slide the template out and reuse it. Place a teaspoon of the mixture in the centre of each circle and smooth out to the edges of the circle with a wet flat knife or back of a spoon. Spread them thinly, but not so thin that there are holes. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until lightly browned. To ensure enough time to roll the brandy snaps, put one tray into the oven 5 minutes before the other.

Remove the brandy snaps from the oven and cool on the baking tray for a few seconds, then lift the biscuits off with a palette knife and roll around wooden spoon handles. Don’t wrap them tightly around the handle – the snap will dangle off it, and the only bit of the snap that needs to be held tightly against the handle is the overlap: press that join firmly to seal. Then slide off the handle and place on a wire rack. If the snaps become too hard to roll, pop them back in the oven for a few seconds. Repeat with the remaining mixture.

Dice the strawberries and taste: add a little sugar if they are not sweet and juicy enough. Let them sit while you fill the snaps, so that they release a little juice.

To fill the brandy snaps, stir together the filling ingredients and spoon into a piping bag fitted with a small star nozzle and pipe into each end of the biscuits.

Top with a spoon or two of strawberries, and a sprig of mint if available. Serve as soon as they are filled.

An Egg

2008-03-11T23:16:00.015-04:00

Humpty Dumpty is not an egg. At least, he is not necessarily an egg. The rhyming riddle documenting his accident never specifies his species. An early illustrator decided the matter, and since then it has been taken for granted that the answer to the conundrum is not that Humpty is, as some suggest, a gun, or Richard III, or Cardinal Woolsey, but that he is a dapper, hapless egg. Perhaps we persistently depict this punch line because it so satisfyingly represents the permanent shattering that solving a mystery produces: look! We’ve cracked the code! Revealed the secret! Like a smashed egg, there’s no use in trying to pack a cracked code up again.

Eggs and secrets seem to go together. I was raised on tales of the jewel-encrusted Easter eggs made by Fabergé for the Empress of Russia across the years that turned the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Under the theme of “Things I Will Never be Given, but Should, Because I Would Know How to Appreciate Them,” my mother talked wistfully about those carved, jeweled eggs and their pricelessness. “The Violent Loss of Imperial Grandeur” was another favourite theme, so the Fabergé eggs got jumbled in with thrilling, blood-spattered allusions to Romanov executions, hemophiliac sons and the missing Princess Anastasia. The case of the woman claiming to be Anastasia, the one survivor, was of particular and abiding interest in our household.

I’m not sure if my mother was more attached to the idea of remnant royalty, or to the possibility of passing as that remnant. The woman who called herself Grand Duchess Anastasia was finally revealed to be a Polish factory worker: a posthumous DNA test betrayed the secrets of her bones. She was a peasant who tried on the crown. She made herself princess by piecing together shards of knowledge, etiquette and deportment, leading several royals to declare that whoever she was, she was no commoner. But childhood friends remembered her putting on airs and graces: she had cast the die for a royal life early on – history merely filled the cavity. At least she forced the race-obsessed Duke of Edinburgh to the indignity of rolling up his sleeve and having his Grade A cells sized up against hers.

It turns out that many of the recovered Fabergé eggs have given up their secrets, too. The first one, made in 1885, is an egg of plain white enameled gold, which cracks open to release a full, matte, golden yolk. This yolk splits in half to reveal a suede-lined nest edged with stippled gold “straw.” In this nest is a tiny hen, her feathers crafted from white and yellow gold. She is timid-looking, made nervous perhaps by the faint fissure running from her beak to her tail. This hinged incision gave access to the final “secret” of the egg – a diamond replica of the imperial crown that itself concealed a ruby pendant in the shape of an egg. As Fabergé wrote to the Emperor, the secret egg pendant “symbolises the Empress’ autocracy.” The secret and the autocracy are both long gone. Somewhere between governments, auction houses and collectors, the crown and its ruby egg vanished. The hen is relieved of her stony innards, her barrenness a welcome pause to the riddling, reiterative reproductions of eggs within eggs. And, of course, to crowns within crowns. These losses comfort me.

And yet, I know that my own daydreams expanded to fill the negative spaces of my mother’s. As she rehearsed how one might escape from Bolshevik bullets while stuffing as many Fabergé eggs as possible into a handbag, I mused on the ways and means of turning Bolshevik. I wasn’t sure if there were any Bolshevik hangouts in my hometown of Orpington. If so, they were not in evidence amongst the ironmongers and tobacconists on the High Street. So instead, I bought a man’s old, black overcoat from a charity shop and slouched around in it, trailing after my mother through Marks and Spencer’s. I thought some Bolsheviks, out for a Sunday afternoon down the shops, might recognize me as one of their own. They would take me in and train me. Thin, fiery-eyed intellectuals with ruined smoky voices. But they never turned up. Instead, my youth was apprenticed in other ways, one of which involved extreme egg crafts.

Every Easter my mother brought out a Tupperware full of white plastic moulds in different egg sizes, patterned like the crazy paving favoured for driveways and patios in the suburbs. My job was to polish the insides of these moulds scrupulously, until the plastic became glossy. Then we melted bars of “cake cover” chocolate over a double boiler, and using a child’s paintbrush, we coated the inside of the moulds with chocolate and left them to dry. If my glossing had been sufficiently diligent, the brittle half shells would pop out of the moulds. If I’d missed a spot, the resulting chocolate rubble went back into the double-boiler for another go around. The mimics of eggs were lined up to undergo secondary transformations into other Easter characters. My mother’s pièce de résistance was a chocolate egg cradle complete with chocolate bunny baby. One half of the egg was placed on its rounded back and tucked, attached with a dab of melted chocolate, inside its upright other half, which was hoisted to form a canopy. A flat bunny, pressed out from another glossed plastic mould, was tucked inside the cradle, its bunny ears resting on a fondant pillow, its bunny body draped with a fondant blanket. The edges of everything were then piped with icing and trimmed with sugar flowers. There was also a 3-dimensional rabbit, with a body made from a large egg, topped with a head made from a small egg, balanced sideways. This gentleman was given a piped orange carrot, some spectacles and a pair of splayed chocolate feet. Other eggs were simply piped together, a name iced on the outside and a flat bunny trapped inside – another doomed “secret,” revealed only when its recipient smashed their gift.

These chocolate bunnies and eggs were always dried on a designated window ledge to harden them up, until one year the sun broke uncharacteristically through grey English skies and we woke to find twenty-five slumped and sagging egg-creatures, cradles akimbo and secret bunnies half protruding from egg bellies. I was in favour of distributing that batch - driving around and knocking on doors, smilingly handing over the grotesque, faintly phylogenic revelations as our meaning of Easter. I was over-ruled.

This year, however, another opportunity for egg wonders (and perhaps horrors) presented itself. My local Fair Foods market announced that they would, for two weeks only, be selling Emu eggs. The first week I fell afoul of stiff competition to secure one of the first 40 eggs. I was told I would have to wait for the emus to lay some more. I waited. And thought of those enormous top-heavy birds with their knock-kneed bare legs folded under them. The next week, I got to market early enough to have my pick of the crop. In a round wicker basket, lined with wispy white and brown feathers, lolled a clutch of huge and wondrous eggs. Glorious in two-tone stipple of aquamarine overlaid with teal, they were the shape of a rugby ball and the size of a newborn’s head. I selected my egg. The shell felt as reassuringly thick as a teapot. Wrapped in brown paper, I carried it home.

Apparently emu eggs have less water content than other eggs, making them a little fluffier when cooked, and one emu egg is equal to about 10 chicken eggs in volume. I decided that scrambling my egg would showcase its fluffiness and allow us to taste its idiosyncrasies. I also thought I should retain a little greenness to the breakfast, to memorialize the shell and Dr. Seuss too. So I baked a batch of rosemary olive oil bread, and procured some parsley. The size and strangeness of the breakfast demanded a guest and delightfully, one arrived in the form of a friend who had undergone a small medical unpleasantness and needed recuperation in our guest room. On waking, we greeted her tartan pajama-d self with a real rise-and-shine plan: drilling two holes in an emu egg, blowing out its viscous contents, and then eating them! Post-operatively delicate though she may have been, our guest was game.

B fetched a hammer and a small brass nail. Balancing the egg in a drinking glass, I tapped a hole in both of its ends, and then B began. Blowing out an emu egg requires two hands, and two full cheeks of air. B looked like the north wind, and blew so hard her eyeballs hurt. We passed the task back and forth, partly because it was such hard work, and partly because watching the results was so disgusting and so compelling. The viscous drip from the egg’s other end soon became a gelatinous torrent that delighted and appalled the audience. Whenever the blower stopped to take a breath, a bubble or two would emerge at the blowing end and respirate slightly. We three looked on asquint. Eggs, we were forcibly reminded, are strange. They hint at prehistoric monstrosities and futuristic invasions. They bulge with vile potential and tell again exactly how brutal our eating habits are.

Although foundational to much cooking as an agent of rise and an efficient protein, an egg is also an implausible gustatory proposal, hated by many. It is too premature, too mucosal. A friend of mine was once forced by her primary school teacher, who hated her Gujarati vegetarianism, to stand in front of the entire class and choke down an egg. An egg is well cast as an instrument of such hateful regime-formation. Those of us who overlook or relish the grisly aspects of our animal-product diets speak of how “I like my egg.” We are particular about eggs and hold on to how those particularities define us. Perhaps this is because, in England and the U.S., we encounter eggs in the morning, when we have a chance to reinvent ourselves – but most mornings this is a chance we dismiss. The nameless, bewhiskered Everyman of Green Eggs and Ham, when invited by Sam I Am to taste a new egg dish, doesn’t welcome it. Indeed, he resists most strenuously and across many miles of uncomfortable travel before exhaustedly altering his tastes.

Perhaps that pestered, droopy-eared creature in his battered top hat is an Englishman. I say this because, in my land, we are made uncomfortable by joyous Sam I Am-ish expressions of choice and liberty such as “Sunny Side Up!” or “Over Easy!” When I first moved to the U.S., I listened, amazed, to these happily, openly coded exchanges in diners. The customer announced himself to the waitress, who then relayed his identity without judgment to the line cook: “Over Easy!” In England, we have opinions about eggs. Englishmen look askew if you peel, rather than slice open your boiled egg . . . or vice versa. There are camps, not choices. Nevertheless, there are delightful variations, once you’ve gotten through the shell. I had a fastidious uncle (a dyed-in-the-wool egg peeler) who introduced my brother and me to a magical supper called Egg in a Cup. Easily prepared by little fingers, Egg in a Cup consists of filling a large and amiable mug with torn up pieces of bread, small knobs of butter, a splash of milk, salt and pepper and the scooped out contents of a soft boiled egg. The elements are less important than the joy of the jumbled form, and the pleasure of the meal having a handle.

Eggs must be treated gently. I very lightly whisked my emu egg, incorporating its pale yolk with its water-clear “white, ” salted and peppered it, and then splashed in a little Jersey milk. In my largest sauté pan, I melted some butter over not much heat and then poured in my voluminous, single egg. All proteins benefit from slow cooking. So I cooked the egg lazily, allowing large curds to form without any agitation, occupying myself instead by slicing up the herb-flecked bread and toasting it.
Towards the end of the cooking, the curds broke up into smaller scrambles, and it felt like stirring porridge. Once plated and tasted, we all agreed that there was something gluey about it – which B spurned outright, but our invalided guest and I found compelling. I had expected a strong and savoury flavour, like a duck egg, but this egg was mild and determinedly creamy. It had a lounging, debauched quality and was so rich that it could have served 20. It seemed like the kind of thing to be fed to the survivors of an all-night party – mangled by drink and dancing and compromising situations, we awaken – a bleary Lumpenpolitik – to the grand nourishment of one green egg, sans ham. Put together again by a shared breakfast: no need for king’s horses nor king’s men.

Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degr és te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu’importe un petit d’un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes

From
Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames
Discovered, edited and annotated by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten

Fruitcake

2008-01-15T01:41:00.000-05:00

Port Meadow is a large and ancient grazing ground in Oxfordshire. It is a floodmeadow, flanked by a thin, brambled-over stretch of the Thames, and no matter the season it is hung with a sense of the sodden. Mud and mists linger above, but there is also the feeling, as you make your way across the soft – ominously soft – ground, of something congressional below. Obscure half-paths emerge from out of the turf, criss-cross briefly, then disappear. The enameled colours of the narrow boats that sidle up against the abrupt riverbanks are the only real brightness anywhere. Cows, sometimes ponies, happen alongside you – sudden companions, made of meat and vapour.

“Freemen” and “Commoners of Wolvercote” have grazing rights on this wide, flat ground that has never once been ploughed, and it is a place where peripatetics become dwellers, and the more conventionally lodged – briskly out for walks in their green wellies - are the transients. One November day on the meadow I stumbled across a small and straggly television crew interviewing a group of Travellers. The water-proofed interviewer asked his wrap-up question: “So what’s the one thing most necessary in life?” Clearly bored by this quest for three seconds of nomadic wisdom, no one answered. Then a young freeman, a dreadlocked girl, leaned close in to the microphone and said, flat as a penny, “Cake.”

I have long been of the same opinion. An early and famous tantrum of mine was thrown over being removed from a café, and thus from the chance of cake, when the price list arrived at the small formica table. I am proud to report that my rage was so shattering, my aunt and uncle pledged then and there to remain childless for life. Since then, nothing much has changed. I happily rearrange my life, and the lives of others, around the pursuit of good cake and if I sniff such a cake on the wind, I am not to be deterred until I am sat down before it, fork in hand. But recently I realized – like the returning memory of a strange and portentous dream, hours later when the day is at its most raw and real – that I have been subduing a long dark craving for a particular kind of cake – a cake I rarely see anymore, a cake that lay submerged beneath my pursuit of other cakeish delights - fruitcake. As the winter months started closing in, I was gripped by the stubborn clutching upward of this old and betrayed taste. It had been, I calculated, seven years since I had made or tasted fruitcake. A week made of years. The need for fruitcake lay in me like a fallen clock weight.

A good fruitcake is made well ahead of itself. In my childhood, our Christmas fruitcakes were made by my Nana in Birmingham and fetched home to be iced by my mother in London. Nana made the cakes because no-one could make them like her. In her kitchen, pounds and ounces meant nothing – her cakes were made from handfuls. I called her recently – she has been eighty-three for at least ten years – hoping to reconstruct the gist of the recipe with her. But like the Travellers on the meadow, Nana was uninterested in passing along her knowledge. She denied that she had any knowledge. There was no recipe to be passed down, just a reminder, made in a thin voice over a crackling international phone call straddling time zones, to use brown sugar.

When Nana made the cakes, she made them a month in advance of Christmas and we drove up to get ours. We always seemed to make the drive at night. Sunk deep into the back seat of the car, I stared up and out of the window to catch the first sight of the illuminated city, promising myself that one day I would live in a high-rise and also be a bright window of light in a night sky. Once at Nana’s, my brother and I were layered into bunk beds. Leaning out a little, I could twitch the nylon lace curtain aside and watch the traffic go by. Double-decker buses satisfied me best. The towerblocks we’d driven past glowed with intimations of varied and sovereign lives. Now those lives roared past my brother and me, the buses glowing, their two decks packed with many faces alive with possibility. Later next day, we got ready to leave and make the drive back down in dreary daylight. I was told to retrieve a cake from where they were stashed under the sideboard, each one housed in a dented biscuit tin – the kind that had once held Christmas biscuit assortments. I pried open the lids to find the ones with cake - there was always one full of old keys.

Our cake came with us down south. We packed it into the car and waved our goodbyes. But that cake was headed south in more ways than one. It was bound for doom and damnation – in the form of Drink. My grandparents’ household was strictly teetotal. I was always told that Poppa’s years of war service on the submarines had shown him the evils of the bottle , and no-one was allowed to bring drink into his house. Herein lay a problem. A fruitcake is the most immortal of cakes, as weighty and mindful as a cheese. But its longevity must be procured through intoxicants. Sherry or rum, brandy or whisky: a fruitcake needs its tipple. So the removal of the cake from Nana’s to our kitchen was a smuggler’s run, and Poppa, who observed the handover in silence, must have known it.

Home again, I watched as the cake was unwrapped from its double-jacket of greaseproof paper and foil, revealing its pocked, seductive surface. The common practice, at this stage of things, is to stab the top of the cake with a skewer, or maybe a knitting needle, and then drizzle your liquor of choice over the holes, allowing it to sink in. Feeding the cake once a week or so renders it succulent and vivacious come Christmas. My mother, however, felt that this was doing things half-mast. Although there was many a knitting needle in our house – including a strange set of metal ones, sharpened to a renovated point by my teetotaler grandfather – my mother eschewed craft for science. She had a nurse friend, who wore starched white and navy uniforms, cinched with an affecting belt. This friend crept on regulation soles down a gleaming, squeaky corridor to a stock cupboard and acquired my mother a large hypodermic needle. Each week we undressed the cake and my mother drew a length of amber-coloured sherry into the syringe, then repeatedly pierced and incrementally released the liquid into the body of the cake, a drop welling up at the site of each puncture. I watched, entranced. Injections are particularly pertinent to the young, because they are such a definite encounter with state-sanctioned pain. They work in a phantasmal future, protecting you from diseases that others got before you, but from which your generation will be saved if you just – and you must! – surrender to the needle. And the fruitcake yielded, too, or perhaps it yielded on my behalf – accepting the slow slide of the long needle without sting, without complaint.

My family recipe, then, is for a brown sugar cake that betrays temperance and accuracies of inventory, and that gains its long life (as many of us do) with a little help from the medical profession. My first task, clearly, was to get hold of a large bottle of brandy. My second was to procure a hypodermic needle. And my third was to find a recipe with actual, measurable ingredients. The brandy and the recipe were easy – a well stocked drinks cabinet provided one and Nigel Slater stood gamely in for grandma, providing the other.

The second of my tasks stumped me for a while. I solicited a medical friend – a doctor. He cheerily agreed, but it turns out that doctors aren’t allowed in stockrooms, and after two abortive attempts to duck into one, he said my chances were slim. Nevertheless a few days later he was successful; a nurse sympathetic to the cause had been enlisted, I was now the owner of a sizeable syringe and a selection of sterile-packed needles – “We’re not trained what gauge to use for fruitcake,” he explained.

Furnished with contraband, I was ready to summon ingredients. A fruitcake must possess the gallantry of crumb, not be simply frenzied with fruit. And the fruits themselves – they should not be painted into living-dead charades of summer colour. They must be dark, they must not deny that they are aged, they must carry with them the signs of their survival. It seems to me that a fruitcake is indeed an audacious creature, but its audacity is a consequence of sly hoardings, dubious exchanges and shameless incongruities. A fruitcake is a brazen and aging hussy, tossing its head at strictures of season and locale, demanding indulgence, flaunting acquisition. It is an American southerner who tells it best; Truman Capote, who knew something about fruitcake, delivers a tale of the making of Christmas cakes that pairs an abandoned child and a simple, elderly cousin, raking ingredients out of the leaves of poverty and disavowal. The cakes are soaked in moonshine, bundled into a baby carriage and mailed to a president.

A fruitcake mixes fruits of the vine with those of the tree and the bush, all stolen from their own time, delayed into another. These fruits are picked at their peak of ripeness only to be dried, wizened for futurity, then revived again, swelled by alcohol itself aged and stored and fermented. A fruitcake violates generation and seasons and then revels in its own untimeliness – prepared in advance, preserved and often eaten long after the festival it marks. An aunt of mine was once at a wake where fruitcake was served. A nippy plate circulator observed my aunt's pleasure as she took the first bite and commented, “Good cake isn’t it? Corpse baked it herself.”

Cake thou art, and unto cake shalt thou return. Fruitcake is dyed with tannins, and it ingests its own avarice, starting to recall the blackest, earliest kinds of wealth, returning the cake to the sod that grew it. I therefore filled mine with the darker fruits - figs and prunes – fruits that saturate and irritate, and with the woodier, less prancing nuts – hazelnuts and walnuts. And my sugar was the most treacle brown I could find. I injected the cake over several weeks, and then I pressed the heavy blade of my largest knife to its firm crust and cut it like peat, its wet, half-ancient geology finally exposed.

SYLLABUS: FRUITCAKE
Slightly adapted from Nigel Slater
This is a large cake, enough to feed 16.

350g unsalted butter
175g light muscovado sugar
175g dark muscovado sugar
1kg total weight of dried fruits - prunes, figs, candied peel, and dried rather than glace cherries if you can find them. I used an equal mix of Bing and Ranier dried cherries – delicious.
5 large free-range eggs
100g ground almonds
150g shelled hazelnuts
500g total weight vine fruits - raisins, sultanas, currants,
5 tbsps brandy
zest of 1 lemon
zest and juice of 1 orange
1/2 tsp baking powder
350g plain flour

You will also need a 24-25cm cake tin with a removable base, fully lined with a double layer of lightly buttered greaseproof paper or nonstick baking paper, which should come at least 5cm above the top of the tin. If you skip this bit, the edges of the cake will burn.

Set the oven to 160 C/gas mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl from time to time with a spatula.

While the butter and sugars are beating to a light and fluffy texture, cut the dried fruits into small pieces, removing the hard stalks from the figs. Add the eggs to the mixture one at a time - it will curdle but don't worry - then slowly mix in the ground almonds, hazelnuts, all the dried fruit, the brandy, the citrus zest and juice.

Now mix the baking powder and flour together and fold them lightly into the mix. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin, smoothing the top gently, and put it in the oven. Leave it for an hour, then, without opening the oven door, turn down the heat to 150 C/gas mark 2 and continue cooking for 2 hours.

Check to see whether the cake is done by inserting a skewer into the centre. It should come out with just a few crumbs attached but no trace of raw cake mixture. Take the cake out of the oven and leave it to cool before removing it from the tin.

Bitter Orange

2007-11-07T00:49:00.000-05:00

Weddings – pallid, repetitious – happen beneath the orange blossom, but bitter births, the ballads tell us, happen beneath the thorn. Bitter births, no two the same, stubborn shovings into the world, the sharp, bright reminders of forced or lost or hopeless love. We have a tree in our small, bricked garden, a tree of just such beginnings. Out of place, wrong, transplanted – it spites the odds, withstanding the wrong climate with a sort of belligerence. It is a gnomish orange tree, and it has blossom, thorn and fruit. The trunk is tripartite; it grows into and out of itself again, three separate trunks fused ominously together. And the leaves are three-part too. Poncirus trifoliata: a three-leaved citrus. The ghostly and scentless blossoms drift across the tree not once but twice a year, mistakenly, a way of coping with alien seasons. They come first in early spring, against the black mesh of thorny branches, then again in late spring, against a bright and poison green. The thorns are two inches long and dagger–sharp. And the fruit that comes – sometimes later, sometimes intermingled with its flower – is hard, round, sure and vehemently orange. But for all their hardness the oranges are covered in a light down – “pubescent,” say the botanists – and it’s true that they crowd the tree with a kind of adolescent feeling; social, often mottled, precipitate. The rush to fruit clutters the tree with eager masses and desperate outliers, and when they fall they rain down hard, careless of where they roll.

Most trees grow around us without benefit of narrative, but the strangeness of this tree has preserved the story of its origin. We bought our moody slice of house from a young French teacher named Michael, who had lived in the house for three years before he fell in love with a Montreal patriot who refused to come south, and demanded that Michael emigrate. With a certain urgency, Michael told us about the woman from whom he had bought - Miss Polly, who had been born in the house and lived there 90 years until she upped sticks to move in with the daughter-in-law widowed by her son. There were three things of Miss Polly’s that he was leaving with us, Michael said. The first two he had found in the attic crawlspace. A splintering frame containing a porous, elderly print of St. Anthony, the saint of lost things and lost causes. And another frame holding Miss Polly’s 1943 beauty school certificate. This diploma attests to Miss Polly’s training in “Scalp and Hair Treatment, and Beauty Culture.” Mary Pressley Norman, it declares in cursive, “is a competent operator in Marcel Waving, Water Waving, Finger Waving, Round Curling, Hair Dressing, Hand Moulding, Electrical Appliances, Sanitation and Sterilization, Anatomy and Skin Bleaching.” Miss Polly, Michael told us, didn’t care about the two framed guarantees. We could do with them as we wished. But the third thing – the third thing we must protect.

The third thing was the tree. No-one, she asked, should ever take an axe to her orange tree. From years of discipline, of Marcel and Water Waving, of Hand Moulding and Skin Bleaching, she had saved money for a trip to Jamaica. When she returned, she smuggled back in her hand luggage three small, green, thorny sproutings from her paradise. Somehow they reached toward the distant, cold Philadelphia sun, melded and survived. Old houses bear the marks of their travails. Our house is made of little rooms and passages that break the simple rectangle up into interlocking spaces, scarred from old leaks, the cracked paint of previous lives heaving beneath the clean new coats. Dark, textured by old paper, plaster, dented woodwork, bead and board and porcelain; our house has a whiff of the sinister. We hung Miss Polly’s certificate in the living room, its papery gold foil seal glinting in the dim light. In the dining room, St. Anthony clutches his heavy lilies and bends over the child Jesus. Their gloomy, glimmering halos blend together. And in the garden the tree lifts its crown of thorns, bright with oranges.

We have now lived alongside this tree for three years. Two Octobers came and went, twice the oranges hurled themselves like suicidal teenage lovers from their thorny branches. Twice I swept them in their hundreds under the garden door, where they were squashed by passing garbage trucks, or were batted down the alleyway by that year’s generation of lean and hungry feral kittens. Like the kittens, I am a scavenger. I fill my pockets with unidentifiable nuts found on walks, and have been known to steal the decorative kale out from under party platters, smuggle it home and feast upon it steamed,sautéed and stewed. But for two years these oranges in all their abundance failed to tempt me. I’d found some hints here and there that you could make marmalade out of them, but . . . you can make marmalade out of old boots if you smother them in sugar and boil til dead. Dry and hard, Miss Polly’s oranges were the bright emblem of her dedication to the sinewy goals of survival and beauty. There was none of the yielding effulgence, the lazy, juicy fulsomeness necessary for culinary pleasure.

But this year we enjoyed a long summer. The warm days stretched on and on. We went away for a month and, unobserved, the tree let down its guard. The oranges swelled beyond their usual clench, they ripened smooth and bright and taut with juice. When I stepped on one, it tore and its spill of seed and sap released a fresh, floral scent reminiscent of passion fruit. The tree was still in charge – in this year of lusciousness, it was commanding me to cook its crop.

It is the pucker of marmalade of which I am fond – there’s no point in marmalade slumped into sweetness. Marmalade is a sophisticated vice – half-kiss, half-bite. It grips the palate and pleases through severity. Which is why, of course, the English like it. It preserves the scold of the school dormitory on the breakfast plate of the civil servant. It encodes our sourness, our love of critique, our brutality, into a jar of brilliant orange. A friend of mine, a fellow-émigré, wears mostly marmalade-orange – her hair too – and I love her for it. She has plucked the English thorn from beneath the skin and learned to play with its point. For me, the thorn may be too deep. But a good marmalade reminds me that I owe a great deal to this bitterness that is both a taste and a feeling; it is a part of who I am. And making marmalade, boiling bitters, watching the bright brew quicken and shiver, watching for the setting point -- is an exercise in control and violence, in finding just that balance where the sharp limit of what is pleasing dissolves, stinging, upon the tongue.

It’s hard to explain Englishness here, in a country where a blind and saccharine Anglophilia makes idols of our worst selves. There will always be cruelties we cannot curb, so we suspend pith and peel, the orange’s protective shell, in the pressings of its own lost juices – reconvening the bitter and the sweet before we swallow it whole. Marmalade belongs to the slap of morning. Jam we use for comfort, at teatime, but marmalade hardly ever. Marmalade, along with coffee, breaks our fast through bitterness. Is this an exorcism of the night’s terrors? A hope to have faced the worst before the day begins? Or is it a philosophical affection for astringency? Astringents reassure us that we are feeling beings, let us feel the wound, but are styptic too – contracting our tissues, staunching loss.

The juice I wrung from Miss Polly’s oranges was a strange fluid. Tinged phosphor green and viscous, its scent was more flower than fruit. A waxy, lunar residue clung to my knife. I tasted a tiny sliver of rind, and even my hard-learned lessons in the benefit of bitterness failed me: it was pure wormwood and gall. Seville oranges, the traditional marmalade fruit, are prized for the particular bite of their rind, but these . . . my tongue recoiled and clove to the roof of my mouth. My source recommended repeatedly blanching the hemispheric rinds in boiling water. This, I was informed, would leach out the bitterness until its levels became tolerable. So I scalded the rinds over and over, discarding the water each time, and nibbling pieces to calibrate my progress. The bitterness, however, never even faded. It scorched my tongue and shook its fist at my efforts to quell it. Even when I became retaliatory, shredding it before submerging in the boiling water, it refused to give up its repellent powers. I’d laboured now for hours and my fingers itched to toss those iridescent shreds into my pan of hard won juice, but I knew that if I reintroduced that peel to the fragrant liquid, its charms would wither.

So I banished the peel and turned my marmalade into a jelly. It is delicious and strange, its flavour somewhat haunted – by both the tree’s sweet blossoms and the oranges' bitter rind. And its form, too, has something uncanny about it. Glassy, vapourish and possessed of a bewitching hint of the thorn.

Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.

I do not guess his name
Who wrought my Mother's shame,
And gave me life forlorn,
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
I know her from all other.
My Mother pale and mild,
Fair as ever was seen,
She was but scarce sixteen,
Little more than a child,
When I was born
To work her scorn.
With secret bitter throes,
In a passion of secret woes,
She bore me under the rose.

-- Christina Rossetti

Peas

2007-07-10T01:28:00.000-04:00

I sleep in a bedroom painted “Pea Green.” It is a colour that follows you into slumber, pulling the gate of the day to. I got the idea from a friend, who years ago painted every room (in a house I never saw, with his lover whom I was too late to meet), all in shades of green. A vegetal interior, top to bottom leaf, frond and furl. I imagine that this was like living inside out; they made themselves a house in which they could roam the greenwood. And it was a turning away from the taut business of choice: instead of seeking the one perfect verdant shade, they had gathered swathes of greens and chosen all.

The greenest fruit, the pea, has been used as a fulcrum for some dubious practices of selection. One of the stories that Hans Christian Andersen collected, The Princess and the Pea, tells of the prince who must marry a princess, and only a real one will do. One evening just such a princess turns up, sodden, seeking shelter from the rain. She is offered a bed of twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds too, under which a single pea has been stranded by a queen’s bony hand. In the morning, when asked how she slept, she complains roundly of something in the bed that bruised her all over. Seized by this as proof of the girl’s blue-blood, the queen whisks her to the altar with her witless son. Why did that pinched monarch think that this particular legume would single out a princess? Raised in the stalked siblinghood of a pod, a pea is as companionable as a syllable. What truck would it have with overseeing the segregation of real from pretend princesses? And leaving its siblings aside for a moment, the single pea, inside its own dashing jacket, is a fellow of two halves. The pea knows, surely, that we are all seamed creatures, as liable to split as roll.

My own feeling is that the small green pea in Andersen’s tale is actually a red herring. The princess satisfies her future mother-in-law not because she is a highly calibrated critic, but because she knows how to throw a huge hissy fit. The real princess knows to complain, even about the luxuries that cushion her. This is the true sign of aristocracy so-called. All lower orders are raised to emit thanks routinely, smoothing over the failings of others and anxiously sweeping the spaces we occupy, all to ward off eviction. I was always fascinated by the amplified, excessive comforts of that square heap of mattresses, but I was never sure whether I desired to be the girl atop them, or the secret but telling pea stifled under their weight. Of course, if the queen is right and breeding always tells, then my place in the story is as the unstoried chambermaid, who must heave down the manic pile of bedding in the morning, shaking her mobcapped head when she unearths the hard nubble of the pea.

The queen’s pea, to suit her purpose, would clearly have been dried, not fresh. Dried peas featured in my childhood, also as an agent of separation. On visits to my Nana and Poppa in Birmingham, we were served up green peas, heated from frozen, with our plates of meat and potatoes. But mysteriously, Poppa had his own special peas – marrowfat dried peas that had to be set to soak the day before. Curious, I would lower the swing-down step of the steppy stool, climb up to counter level and peer into the bowl of large, sullen peas submerged beneath the water. Their grey-green pallor, their wizen that swelled to a slow smoothness, held a kind of goblin allure for me. At dinner, I often petitioned to have a spoonful of them on my plate, partly to taste their floury outlandishness and partly to see if my childish request to share his food might penetrate the seclusion of my grandfather. Husked and dry himself, his taste for marrowfat peas came from the privations of the war. I don’t know if dried peas were part of the diet of the submarines he served in, or the civilian rations he came home to, but his special bowl on the kitchen counter was a signal that this household had been assembled in the crucible of war, and that the very taste of combat, as well as its silences, remained beneath the everyday prattle of the present. Our peas, green and verdant as the summer day on which they were frozen, burst sweet on our tongues even as I watched Poppa at the end of the table, lifting forkfuls of his own gray peas to his lips.

Beatrix Potter, writing in 1918 at the end of an earlier war, understood peas and the translations they could effect. She uses peas not to differentiate, but to muddle up class and place. Peas get Timmy Willie, the simple country mouse, into some trouble in a hamper. Having crawled in through a hole in the wicker-work and feasted on the peas inside, Timmy Willie takes a post-prandial nap and ends up transported to the city. In the city he must negotiate the nice manners, the neckties and dining tables of city mice. Out of place, transferred by the love of peas into the perils of sophistication, Timmy Willie longs to return home. He finally makes it back, under the protection of that most despised of vegetables, the cabbage. But the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse is not a tale of the indissoluble differences between classes and ways of living; it is a verdant love story. Potter’s watercolors are all tinted with dreamy greens in this tale, from the hammock-like pod Timmy Willie falls asleep in, to his geranium leaf umbrella, to the withered cabbage leaf that chaperones him back to his much-missed country life. Finally, when Johnny Town-mouse visits him in his violet-scented rural home, Timmy Willie makes his fancy friend a bed of grass clippings and the two mice sit together and share a herb pudding in the sun. Led from home by the aristocratic pea and summoned back by the humble cabbage, Timmy walks a green road that ends in fellowship; the country mouse has found himself a very dashing and nicely dressed gentleman with whom to share his vegetal idyll.

Timmy's green and savoury pudding stays with me as an ideal of hospitality - sprigged with the same foliage that canopies his modest dining table. So when I found shelling peas at the market last week, alongside a tangle of flowered and coiled pea shoots, I wanted to make something green and full of garden. I had invited my friend Bryn for dinner, to thank her for ushering me through a time of trial. Bryn is as lovely as a pea shoot herself, and real in a way that horrible mattress-piling queens could never divine. I felt that teacups should be involved in my homage to Bryn, because teacups are always, in all contexts, both homey and fancy – a mix, perhaps, of Timmy and Johnny. I have a set of glass teacups that I usually use to serve flowery tisanes, and it was these teacups that led me to choose chilled fresh pea soup. I found plenty of recipes that granted room to both herb and foliage. Some cooked a couple of fresh pods in with the peas, some used lettuce, and most used mint. I would use mint but also . . . something more.

What I found strange as I foraged for a recipe, was the universal agreement among cooks that green peas are, somehow, ineluctably English. It was “English peas” this and “English peas” that. The only exception, in a typical cross-channel stand off, is for the really tiny green peas – petit pois. Somehow the French have claimed land rights to the itty bitty ones. “The pea! It is English! You can see by its greenness, its pleasantness, its regularity! It is English!” “Pah! You English may have the regular pea, the galumphing big pea, but we, the French, will claim the tenderest, the tiniest, the sweetest!”

Not surprisingly, the history of the pea in both of these unpleasantly arrogant nations is a history of class distinction. In Paradisi in Sol (1629), John Parkinson writes: "Peas of all or most of these sorts, are either used when they are greene, and be a dish of meate for the table of the rich as well as poore, yet every one observing his time, and the kinde: the fairest, sweetest, youngest, and earliest for the better sort, the later and meaner kinds for the meaner, who do not give the deerest price." Meanwhile, across the water in France, a mania for green peas was prompted by a very real, very hissy-fit throwing princess indeed – an Italian one from a formidable family. Catherine de' Medici brought "pisella novelli" with her from Florence in 1533 for her marriage to Henry II and they soon became acclaimed as a royal dish – to be distinguished from the boiled peas eaten by the French peasantry. Little fresh green peas became the aristocratic craze. In a May 10, 1695 letter, Mme. De Maintenoy writes to Cardinal de Noailles: "The subject of peas is being treated at length: impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, and the longing to eat them again are the three points about which our princes have been talking for four days. There are some ladies who, after having supped with the King, and well supped too, help themselves to peas at home before going to bed at the risk of indigestion. It is both a fashion and a madness."

In other words, The English and the French got peas from the Italians, then set about arguing over whose peas were whose, and denying peas to some and granting them to others. And true to form, both England and France conveniently forgot that peas are, in fact, Asian. The noble ancestor of the modern pea is believed to have dwelt somewhere between Afghanistan and northern India. My soup, I decided, would therefore have a tantalizing hint – almost unplaceable, but enough to annoy both English and French palates – of curry.

But culinary tussles over class and nation – and my own pedantic but ultimately delicious engagement – rage in vain around the pea. For quite some time now, peas themselves have quietly but firmly debunked the very premise of the battle. Once upon a time, British plant physiologist Thomas Andrew Knight (1759 - 1838), found a wrinkled, degenerate, miserable looking pea in a whole field of smooth green peas. Knight had ambitions to develop new and better breeds, and he suspected that treasures lurked in that tumble-down legume. A reach backwards, he realized, was in fact the way forward. A generation later, Gregor Johann Mendel chose peas for his studies of dominant and recessive traits, developing theories of genetic variation. Heredity, he began to demonstrate, is discontinuous. Princesses, in other words, are never real. Aristocracy and peasantry pop up where you least expect them – they are in fact interchangeable, inter-referenced variations on the same theme.

I sat in my kitchen in the morning, popping the seams of the pods and running a thumb along the ranks of peas. Shelling peas has a tactile rhythm to it and the peapod itself has a peculiar, Art Deco-like blend of symmetry and asymmetry. There is almost no work in the world as physically and aesthetically pleasing as shelling fresh peas. The peapods' mix of repetition – “as alike as peas in a pod” – and whimsy – those tapered, flutey-hatted stems – simultaneously awes and delights me. And the scent is pure summer.

That evening, Bryn tasted her soup delicately. She said nothing between her first spoonful and her second, but her silence was companionable, communicative and generous. She let me know she liked it by the way she blinked, slowly, dipping her spoon back into the taste of bright green.

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has
That lawful Orchards mocks --
How luscious lies within the Pod
The Pea that Duty locks --

-- Emily Dickinson

SYLLABUS: FRESH PEA SOUP

Serve this soup the same day that it is made, otherwise it will oxidise and lose its vivid green. The fiddly icing of the peas, before and after cooking, will help them retain their colour. The multiple sievings will produce a luxurious texture, but simply leave some out if you want a more rustic soup.

2oz (50g), 4 tblsp unsalted butter
6 oz or one bunch of spring onions or young, green-stemmed onions, chopped
one small butter lettuce, sliced
1 tsp sugar
1 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp curry powder (best made yourself), or nutmeg
3 lbs in the pod, young green peas – save 4 or 5 of the freshest peapods
about 6 mint leaves
1 1/2 pints vegetable stock (or light chicken stock, or water)
salt and white pepper
crème fraiche for garnish
pea shoots or mint sprigs or reserved whole cooked peas to garnish

Heat a medium saucepan over high heat for about 1 minute. Add 4 tablespoons of butter and when it foams, stir in the onion, curry powder and 1 tsp of salt. Turn the heat down to medium and cook 5-7 minutes until the onion is translucent. Do not let it colour. Add the lettuce, stir to coat well and cook another 4-5 minutes until it has wilted. Stir in the mint leaves and turn off the heat.

Put the peas in a bowl, cover them with ice cubes and toss together to chill them.
Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add the sugar and the salt. Remove the ice cubes from the peas and, adding to them, set up an ice bath of ice cubes and water with a colander sitting in it. Add the peas from to the boiling water. It is important that the water returns to a boil as quickly as possible, so only cook them in small batches, maintaining the boil. Cook for 7-10 minutes, depending on the quantity and quality of the peas, being sure not to undercook them. You should not strive for an al dente texture. Removing the peas with a strainer or slotted spoon, immediately dunk them into the colander in the ice bath. Repeat this process until all the peas are cooked, boiling the 4-5 peapods (for flavour) with one of the batches.

Puree the peas and the onion-lettuce mixture together in a food processor, adding a little of the stock to loosen it a little. Then scrape the puree through a tamis if you have one, or the finest mesh on a food mill. Place the puree in a blender with about half of the vegetable stock and blend. Adjust the consistency, using the rest of your stock. Pour through a Chinois and chill well. Once cold, add salt and white pepper to taste. Serve decorated with pea shoots or mint leaves and a small scoop of crème fraiche.

Hot Cross Buns

2007-04-11T13:55:00.001-04:00

The world is made, it sometimes seems, to pucker around us. It has a drawstring of rules and regulations, substitutions and evaluations, examinations, meter readings, caliper-pinchings and drive-by assessments. The worst of it is: we consent to these cinchings in. We sign on to living in the small print. We come to believe that black-out dates should apply, and that if we don’t fulfill requirements, we have only ourselves to blame. Then we add our own astringencies: sideward glances and snide gossip. When we manage to squeeze past bureaucratic barbed wire, we turn to check if those behind us will snag their clothing. Sometimes it is hard to know how to live around and about these fetters. And most times it is hard to remember that they are fetters at all; so natural have our self-policings become.

I was recently nudged to consciousness regarding culture’s tendency to criminalise the good life, when I learned that in 1592 a law was passed against buns. Yes, the tender bun, that sticky friend. Once this mild-mannered bun stared mournfully out from behind a legislative portcullis. The law was passed under Queen Elizabeth I, and it forbade bakers to “make, utter, or sell” any “spice cakes, buns, biscuits, or other spice bread (being bread out of size and not by law allowed).” An exception was made for funerals, Christmas and the Friday before Easter. It’s difficult to imagine that a Queen could forbid a baker to utter a bun. Putting forth pastry hardly seems like treason. But the decree was issued in a time when any whiff of Papistry was exactly that: treasonable. And Papistry was brought to mind by the incense-like spicing, and the heavy symbolism of the cross-bearing bun.

The law was roundly flouted and finally revoked. Like most regulation, it refused the weight of history even as it pushed against it. The Springtime practice of eating small, spiced cakes marked with a sign of the season is found in many ancient cultures. The Egyptians marked theirs with a pattern representing the horns of an ox. The Greeks and Romans also made flour and honey cakes and marked them in honour of Athena, goddess of the moon. The Saxon, after daubing himself with wode, made crossed buns in honour of the goddess of light, Eostre. Christianity, of course, asked Eostre to slide over and before she could blink, it had stolen her hat. Eostre became Easter and the cross on the bun that had represented the four phases of the moon and the four seasons of the year, came to be seen as the cruciform. Now in spite of my Catholic upbringing, it seems clear to me that no baked goody should be asked to sport a reminder of an unpleasantly stretchy death. And yet the Hot Cross Bun has proved affable enough to withstand even this. It has a kind of portable hospitality. The bun is the culinary equivalent of the vanity case: a domed supply of the small luxuries that can help you put yourself together again. Cushy, sweet, sociably spiced and jeweled with dried fruit, it appears on street corners, and in nursery rhymes, and in tuck boxes. It even gets taken, like an apology, to bears unfortunate enough to live at the zoo.

This year I had been feeling caged and melancholy myself, and I decided that I would cheer myself up by trying my hand at Hot Cross Buns. Down from the shelves came my battery of English cookbooks, and I spent a happy hour leafing through various ladies’ various bun strategies. Not a single American cookbook could help me. Like many English treats, the Hot Cross Bun does not please the puritanical palate of the average American. I believe this is because of its affinity to fruitcake. Speckled with dried fruit, a Hot Cross Bun carries a suspicion of Christmas across the calendar to Easter, and the American tongue, offended by fruitcake in December, is doubly insulted by the little spiced bun come springtime. Many people loathe the slow, philosophical chewing that must accompany the consumption of dried fruit, and they wrinkle their noses at the crystallized citrics of mixed peel.
I have a nanny-like, tutting disdain for such pickiness. I adore the tartness of the peel and the way its parched texture interrupts the downy dough. I procured currants – not raisins, which would be too big and fleshy – and light brown sugar, to impart the warm colour that would best co-ordinate with its spicy scent. (Elizabeth David rightly sniffs at the commercial turn towards whitening the bun). As for my spice mix, I ground it myself from allspice berries, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves – and then I added that most mystical of flavours: mace. Made from the amber caul of the nutmeg. I played favourites with the spices, holding back a bit with the cinnamon and topping up the nutmeg and clove. The spring eggs I’ve been able to buy these days are extra broad of chest, with proud brown shells and intently saffron-coloured yolks – worthy components for my buns. The milk too, has become rich with the new season. A couple of sunny walks to the market and everything was lining up nicely. The last ingredient, however, was an important one. I had a particular ambition for my bun dough to be decidedly yeasty. I wanted it to carry the brewy tang of yeast as part of its posy of aromatics, and I desired dough that was soft and bready, rising high, but eager to compress like a good feather pillow. Given these aims, I decided that this was no time for character-less dried yeast – I must make my buns with fresh.

Because I make my bread from a sourdough starter, fresh yeast was not something I’d shopped for before. I knew from some web research that it was a relatively rare commodity, so I set out early on Friday morning – Good Friday – prepared to devote a few hours to the quest. I suppose it is a sign of how far I have strayed from the One True Holy and Apostolic, that on the day when I should have been at mass, mourning the death of Jesus, I was charging around Philadelphia in search of a rising agent. But truth be told, I’ve never had much patience with waiting, be it for the resurrection or for the rising of my bread. B. is always cautioning me to give it just another hour, keep the oven door closed just a few more minutes – wait, wait until it’s done. Well, it turned out that I was going to have to summon what little stamina I possessed for my yeast quest. I began with the posh supermarket around the corner, the chainstore that markets the “wholeness” of its foods under the grand cynicism of having swallowed up independent health food stores and cooperatives. Unsurprisingly, no fresh yeast there. Nor, indeed, bread flour. Consume, ye bourgeois hipsters, but don’t cook! My research had warned me that middle-class shops rarely carry fresh yeast and that I am more likely to find it at the cheaper supermarkets with working-class customers. Sadly this logic failed me when I dipped into the Value-Mart down the street – no fresh yeast there, either. Undaunted, I trotted off to the local cookshop in the Italian Market, happily chancing upon a shiny dime en route. Ever since moving to Philadelphia, I have made it a habit to pick up pennies whenever my path crosses them.
The small, brown, forgotten coin – I have even seen people toss them aside with irritation, and I like to take the poor orphans into my custody. They go into an ancient wooden box in my sitting room, and their humble aggregations remind me how happy I am to live in such a walkable city, and how friendly a city this is: paved with gold it might not be, but it is dotted with copper. But the best pennies are, of course, dimes, so I was smug about my Good Friday find.

Yeast, however, was proving more elusive than the loose change of brotherly love. The cookshop had none, neither did the co-op. Worse still, people were automatically testy about my request. “This is fresh yeast,” one server insisted after guiding me by the elbow to the familiar packets of freeze-dried nodules. “It’s fresh yeast that’s been dried.” More than one person wanted to know why on earth I would want such a thing, and the woman at the stuck-up urban artisan bakery was downright mean. No, they wouldn’t sell me fresh yeast, yes they used it themselves, but no I couldn’t buy any, not even a tiny piece. I trailed home dusty and downcast. How could it come to this – that yeast, the earliest domesticated organism – foundational to our culture – our leavening - could prove so out of reach that I could be ridiculed for wanting it? Even the discovery of another two city pennies on the way home couldn’t console me. As I turned the corner, however, I saw what I see every day. The two bread factories at the end of my street. And I realized that what I searched for had been beside me all along (although don’t ask me to admit that this was where two sets of footsteps on the beach became one . . .). Like elves, or stone-rolling archangels, or perhaps like Easter Bunnies, the men who work at those bread factories only do their magic at night. I went home and whiled the afternoon away until I could go and beg them for yeast.

When I returned, at midnight, the teams of white-t-shirted South Philly guys were in full corps de ballet action, swooping and sliding huge pallets of bread from factory to truck. But they good-naturedly stopped to field my quirky inquiry, ruefully informing me that they stopped baking there a month ago, and that now they are only a distribution center. Still, they eagerly climbed on board the yeast-finding mission, shaking their heads at the news that daytime bread purveyors had laughed at me. “There’s lots of bakeries who will give it you,” they said. “But you have to go to the big ones, the ones that bake at night. Or try a pizza parlour tomorrow.” Once they’d established that I had a car, and wouldn’t be traveling on foot, their chorus settled on Anastasio’s as the bakery to try. “They’ll probably even give it to you for free!” I liked how happy they were to give away the goods of others, and I persuaded B and our nieces (who’d lurked around a corner while I did my importuning) to pile into the car and set off for the address deep, deep in South Philly that my neighbour-bakers had given me.

By this time it was 1.30am, and the reason the merry bread-men had not wanted me to be on foot is that I had to make my way through some of the more burned-out parts of the city. We passed many a rusted corpse of a car, and then something that looked like an actual corpse. My companions grew somewhat squeaky, and I felt the mood of our charabanc turned a little against me. What had seemed like a charmingly batty quest was now edging toward the scary. By the time we reached the bright lights of Anastasio’s, my companions were like a pack of twitchy-whiskered, swivel-eared nocturnal creatures, perhaps ready to defend me from the talons of danger, but just as likely to melt into the night at the least sign of trouble. As I disappeared through the battered swing doors to the factory, I caught sight of their three intent faces, on the look-out from behind the rear window, faintly striped by the windshield heating element.

But of course, entering Anastasio’s was like entering the Emerald City. The dozens of friendly bread men were practically singing, and the hot, toasty, utterly permeating smell of sweet white bread made my head feel like it was going to float off my shoulders and bob around like a balloon. For the umpteenth time that day I repeated my request. It was met with hearty good cheer and I was waved towards “the big guy, with the Chicago Bears hat – he’ll help you.” Occupied at the falling-off point of a massive conveyor belt of Kaiser rolls, a truly enormous specimen of Philadelphia manhood stood like the PSFS building, red of face and happy to help. He tipped back the peak of his hat, stuck his yellow pencil in the waist of his white apron and told me to follow. Leading me through an obstacle course of crates of rolls, loaves and hoagies, he beckoned me into a cold room. There, like the iridescent ghosts of gold bars, were piled hundreds upon hundreds of white, wax-paper wrapped bricks of fresh yeast. With an enormous hand, he gave me one and for what I received, I was truly grateful. I asked how much I owed him. “75 cents,” he answered. I gave him a dollar bill and practically wafted out of the factory, brandishing my prize at the waiting entourage. As I opened the car door, I saw it – another penny, mangled and chipped – my thirteenth cent of the day. Recognizing a baker’s dozen when one literally appears at my feet, I reasoned that this windfall might well buy me an indulgence -- a pardoning of my own chips and fissures.

And indeed, the next day I produced a spirit-lifting double batch of the soft, fragrant buns. The fresh yeast frothed into a thick mousse, and the dough rose as swift and certain as the sun. Having read that yeast is good spread thickly on toast, I nibbled at crumbs of it as I cooked, savouring its tongue-coating creamy pungency. My tranquility was punctured by one further test: the flour paste crosses I piped on the buns before baking contracted and broke into segments as the buns beneath them puffed in the oven. But the debris brushed off easily and the replacement I lit upon – marzipan – tasted so good, I relearned the lesson that never sticks: failures often force us to forgo convention for obscurer, better options. What did stick, magnificently, was the bun wash which I fashioned from thinned Golden Syrup. That buns need bun wash enchants me. And that this wash turns you sticky seems too bucolically wonderful to be true.

Long ago the bun broke loose from legal snares, and now – with a little persistence, and some midnight questing - the bun can help us leap over stricture and strain, and even find gratification in it. Oscar Wilde knew all about finding pleasure at the end of a tether. The ever-hungry Algy, who eats all the auntly cucumber sandwiches and devours muffins “calmly,” so as not to get butter on his cuffs, learns the art of Bunburyism from his gallivanting chum, Jack. The fictional friend Bunbury is the alibi that allows these fellows to pursue many a wayward jaunt. And the delicious nature of this waywardness is semaphored to us by Wilde across the footlights, over the heads of the dress circle and through the centuries: there is, he shows us with the arch of an eyebrow, many a lawless pleasure to burying oneself in bun.

SYLLABUS: HOT CROSS BUNS
Makes about 18

1 lb (500g) white bread flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 oz (30g) fresh yeast
2 oz (60g) soft brown sugar
1/2 pint (300ml) whole milk
3oz (90g) butter
1 egg, lightly beaten.
3 tsp mixed spice*
1/2 tsp ground mace
3 oz (90g) currants
2oz (60g) candied chopped peel
marzipan for cross
bun wash: Golden syrup thinned with water, or 2oz (60g) sugar and 5 tablespoons water

*Elizabeth David’s mix: 1/4 oz nutmeg (1 large nutmg), 1/4oz allspice (3 level teaspoons), 1/8oz cinnamon bark (one 6” stick), 1/8oz whole cloves (2 scant teaspoons, about 30 cloves), 1/8oz dried ginger (a piece about 2 inches long). Grind all ingredients in a spice or coffee grinder.

Warm the milk to blood heat.
Crumble the yeast into a separate bowl, add 1 heaped spoon of the sugar and enough of the warmed milk to cream the yeast. Set it aside to froth – which will take about 10 minutes.
Put flour and salt and spices into a warmed mixing bowl. Rub in the butter, then stir in the sugar. Form a well in the centre and pour in the frothy yeast mixture and the beaten egg. Gradually adding the warmed milk, mix into a dough, adding as much of the milk as the dough can hold. It should be soft, but not too liquid. Add the currants and peel and knead for about 6 minutes in a mixer, or 10 by hand. The dough should come together in a ball and start to look smooth and glossy. Place in a clean, greased bowl, cover tightly with plastic and leave it to rise until it is doubled in size. Depending on the warmth of your kitchen, this might take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Plan on an average of 1 hour.

Knock down the dough, cutting it into manageable portions for rolling into several large sausages. Cut the sausages of dough into a total of 18 portions and shape each one into a round, tucking its edges under and smoothing its top. Place on a baking sheet and leave to prove again for another 30 minutes. Slice or snip fairly deep cross shapes into the tops of the buns (don't worry that the buns turn misshapen at this point) and then bake in a preheated 450F/230C/Gas mark 8 oven for 10-15 minutes until assuredly brown. On removing, brush liberally with bun wash while the buns are still warm. Then decorate with rolled or cut strips of marzipan.

These buns will be magnificently soft when right out of the oven. To eat the remainder (supposing there is a remainder), either split and toast them, or warm in a gentle oven (the marzipan turns wonderfully golden brown). I believe the bun then fares best when slathered with good butter.

Oma's Pumpkin Pickles

2007-01-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

A pumpkin is a pod of plenty and paucity. Its taut hide restrains both a density of flesh, and a mass of debris – damp clinging fibres and flat, blanched seeds – that scramble the fruit’s dark chamber. None of this complexity is fully disclosed, it always seems to me, by a knuckle-rap to the exterior. Its heft and creased bulges resonate with the promise of simple, stolid bounty. A pumpkin does not blink. But as Simone Schwartz-Bart puts it, “Only the knife knows what goes on in the heart of a pumpkin.” Push your knowing knife into the hard flesh, feel the wound grip and resist the blade, lean down against the knife handle and slowly crack open the pumpkin’s halves. Now it yawns open, a strangely empty mess, the flesh already weeping clear, clean jewels of liquid. What is it that is really there? It’s not entirely clear where to find the meat of the thing. The preeminent icon of fullness and harvest, the splay of a pumpkin forces the cook to salvage and glean. The meal is in the remnant.

Perhaps this is why we feel compelled to coax pumpkins into becoming massive. Everyone loves a huge pumpkin. It’s the perfect side-show attraction: gather round! guess the weight! Its neon bulk is flatly baffling. Just how we like it. A pumpkin is an exaggeration, and we like to take the helm and steer it into further absurdity and marvel. We run it aground in its field, its orange knobble a picture of tilt and stasis, as if seized mid-roll. Each one a vagrant copy of another. Then we line it up for competition.

Laura Ingalls Wilder tells a suspenseful tale of pumpkin hopes in Farmer Boy. The young Almanzo, who will grow up to fall in love with Laura, nurtures a prize pumpkin by feeding it milk. He cuts a slit into the vine, then “under the slit Almanzo made a hollow in the ground and set a bowl of milk in it. Then he put a candle wick in the milk, and the end of the candle wick he put carefully into the slit. Every day the pumpkin vine drank up the bowlful of milk, through the candle wick, and the pumpkin was growing enormously.” When the day of the county fair arrives, Almanzo’s pumpkin gets rolled into a soft pile of hay, polished and sent off for the competition. A fat judge cuts a thin wedge of Almanzo’s pumpkin, conferring and comparing as the young boy grows ever more dizzy and breathless, before finally leaning over and thrusting a pin with a blue ribbon into the fruit. The prize, however, is not the end of it - Almanzo is made trembly by victory, and is struck by the sudden worry that his enormous pumpkin is a fraud because he fed it milk. The sickening lurch of inadvertent wrong-doing is often as much about the realization of the randomness of rule and regulation – the stakes are so high, but the laws so spectral. How are we to know? What if we are amnesiac learners, and forgot the rules on the way to the prize? When asked “How’d you raise such a big pumpkin, Almanzo?” he stammers between truth and deceit. He finally confesses the milk diet only to be reassured by a consortium of jovial men that some tricks are – wink wink – sanctioned. The glory of a win cannot, however, be fully restored, and the chapter ends with the young boy unsettled and anxious to shake off the flurry of the fair. A dark hollow lurks, perhaps, in every triumph.

But if Almanzo’s giant pumpkin and its success at the fair leaves him feeling empty, a giant pumpkin, I have learned, can also soothe lingering Weltschmertz. One evening over dinner with my friends Imke and Heidi, conversation fell to foods beloved but lost to us. Imke is from Germany and she told tale of her adored grandmother’s sweet and sour pumpkin pickles, and of their yearly production that would engulf the kitchen and engage all the grandchildren. The pumpkin recipe was the prized result of Oma's famous charm: long, long ago the grandmother had winkled it out of Frau Meyerholz, who made the pickles at the local delicatessen in Bremerhaven. The delicatessen shut up shop many years back and Imke had not tasted the pumpkin pickles since her grandmother’s death.

Now I am very partial to a pickle. It is a taste I have inherited from my mother’s side of the family, who all have ulcerous stomachs which they torture with their love obstinate of things preserved in brine. But I had never had pumpkin pickles before, and I was most intrigued. Imke promised to get hold of “Oma’s” recipe and translate it for me. In the meantime, she and Heidi left the suburbs and bought a lovely row house in Philadelphia. I quietly determined to surprise them with a jar of pumpkin pickles to celebrate their new home as a place of respite from the foot-weariness of emigration and the peripatetics of love and work.

The recipe that she delivered called for 10 kilos of pie pumpkin, and I set off to the market with both my bike baskets unfolded and ready to hold piles of small sweet pumpkins. But although the market’s weekly newsletter had promised pie pumpkins, when I arrived at the Fair Foods stall, there was nary a pumpkin to be seen. I asked Emily, the orders manager, and she smiled ruefully and pointed over my head. I turned in the direction of her gesture and saw one single enormous orange gourd, striped and handsome, snouted and tailed. It didn’t look like a pumpkin at all. Emily explained that she, too, had expected tiny pie pumpkins, but what had arrived from the farmer was a crate containing this single enormous gourd. It was a heritage varietal, as sugar sweet as the little pumpkins, but, like Almanzo’s prize of long ago, it was huge and glossy and self-satisfied. Emily was decidedly grim about her mistake – no-one would want a pumpkin that large and she was going to have to use it as decoration and take a loss. She glared at the pumpkin and it beamed back, sunnily oblivious, basking in its own, vast glory.

Happy for a shot at easy heroism, I borrowed some of the pumpkin’s smug satisfaction, and told her that I would take it off her hands and help balance the books. I basked in her gratefulness as she crammed my purchase into a giant brown paper bag of dubious strength. Then, heaving my burden up, I attempted what I thought was a suitably benevolent, airy kind of amble. I managed to keep that up for a few steps, turning to wave a cheery good-bye. But the pumpkin was not only big, it was heavy. By the time I reached the neighboring pastry stall, I had to lower the pumpkin to the ground, adopt a two-handed grip and start dragging the thing backwards toward the exit. Two people took pity on the pink and perspiring girl with the enigmatic encumbrance, holding open the double doors so that I could get to the bike stands, and another passer-by helped me heave the bag onto the rack on the back of my elderly cycle; the monster would not, of course, fit into my baskets. It perched, tipsy, on top, like Cinderella’s coach upon its delicate wheels. An anxious footman, I lured my be-pumpkined old bicycle home, holding my breath as I led it over curbs, and cursing aggressive motorists.

I wondered, in fact, how Cinderella managed, when her elegant coach stopped still on the stroke of midnight, reverting to pumpkin form and rodent scampering. Did she abandon it, exhausted by her magical journey from poverty and back again? Or was she so conditioned to servility and thrift that she hauled the massive thing home and turned it into pickle? Pickle is, after all, the pantry’s pre-eminent arbitrator of bounty and scarcity. Perhaps, when Prince Charming turned up with that crystal shoe, he found his beloved elbow deep in pickle brine.

At home, I hacked the beast open and began festooning the kitchen with pumpkin peel and innards. The recipe called for much and varied application of different vinegars and I set up stations with marinades and canning liquid, bubbling pots and cooling Ball Jars. Oma’s directions, filtered through time and translation, were detailed and idiomatic – it was much like having her at my side. There was only one feature upon which I stumbled. The recipe stated that my pumpkin should be cut “into smaller pieces” which was parenthetically translated as “(5 x 5 cm cubes).” I hesitated. These so-called “smaller pieces” were certainly smaller than the entire pumpkin, but still, 5 x 5 cm is roughly the size of a lime. This, to my mind, is substantial. Most of the pickles I’ve eaten have charmed in part through being diminutive – baby beets are baby, a piccalilli is made from delicate florets. A large dill cucumber pickle is one thing, but these slabs of pumpkin unnerved me. A quick browse of other pumpkin recipes, mostly Indian, didn’t help – they all called for tiny dice. My knife hovered, ready to cut my future pickles down to size. But then again the recipe was so careful, I couldn’t imagine that a mistranslation had occurred. I also remembered that Imke’s family happens to be a family of enormously tall, milk-fed people. Imke herself is 6 foot tall and she is the shrimp of the clan. I concluded that, “like people, like pickle,” and steamed ahead with the transformation of my giant pumpkin into slightly less giant pumpkin pickles. And anyway, my Ball Jars are marked “WIDE MOUTH.”

I bathed the pickles in herbal vinegar, and then set them up in a spiced and tooth-achingly sweet red vinegar in which I floated cinnamon sticks and coins of fresh ginger. The vinegar bath was so potent it made me cough as I stirred it. The filled jars had to rest for 2 weeks before we could deliver them to the threshold of a newly purchased and lovely home. Imke made a special corned-beef dinner called “labscouse” – a North German specialty – to accommodate the pickles, though she said that they are good with any meat dinner, from sausages to pork-chops to duck. Imke exclaimed pleasingly over the pickles’ “echt-ness,” giving particularly vigorous reassurance about the correctness of their size. We speared the pickles with forks and sliced through them, realizing that it is a rare joy to experience the firmness of pumpkin flesh; we are so used to the smooth, soft pies and cheesecakes of the fall season. But these pickles resisted and then yielded to the teeth in the most satisfying possible way. Their sweet, pumpkiny spiciness filled my whole head, sinuses and all, with flavor, and I lit up like a jack-o-lantern between bites of starchy potato and salty corned beef.

Hymn to the Belly
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Room! room! make room for the bouncing Belly,
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly;
Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit,
The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,
The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copper,
The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel,
The hearth and the range, the dog and the wheel.
He, he first invented the hogshead and tun,
The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;
And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,
He's made of himself that now he cries swag;
Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four inches,
Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches
Of any delight, and not spares from his back
Whatever to make of the belly a sack.
Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,
For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!
Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!
And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!
All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,
As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;
But eating and drinking until thou dost nod,
Thou break'st all thy girdles and break'st forth a god.

SYLLABUS: OMA HANSSEN'S PUMPKIN PICKLES

For about 10 kilograms of pumpkin (a very approximate amount), the pieces of pumpkin will be filled into glasses together with the canning liquid and the spices. This means that one has to guess how much canning liquid one needs in order to fill the glasses; one can mix additional canning liquid if the first batch doesn’t suffice.

Peel the pumpkin and remove the seeds, down to where the pumpkin flesh is firm.
Cut the pumpkin into smaller pieces (5x5 centimeter cubes).

Marinade: Equal parts vinegar and water.

The necessary mixing relation is one part vinegar to one part water. Oma Hanssen always used something called “Doppelessig,” an intense vinegar that isn’t available in Germany anymore. Apparently, herbal vinegar is an acceptable substitute. (note from Syllabub: “double vinegar” is any vinegar that is over 6% vinegar. It was hard to find, but I found that Italian vinegars tend to be “double vinegars.”)

Put the pumpkin pieces into big tubs and pour the marinade over them. You don’t have to entirely cover the pumpkin, because the pumpkin is still going to release water – you can pour in marinade to about 6 cm below the level of pumpkin, but stir the pieces several times to make sure they are equally marinated.

Let sit for 24 hours, then discard the marinade.

Canning Liquid
Equal parts red wine vinegar (for the beautiful color) and water
Sugar
Ginger
Cinnamon sticks

Mix the liquid with the spices and the sugar and bring to a boil

Oma’s example for a medium pumpkin:
Approximately 1 liter vinegar and one liter water
2 kilograms sugar
3 pieces dried ginger (large, i.e., each should be the size of a small potato) or sliced fresh ginger (approximately 150 grams)
Cinnamon sticks: approximately 20 pieces that are 3 centimeters in length

Tasting and refining (very important)
--let some of the canning liquid cool down in a cup (it is very hot!) and taste; add additional spice in accordance with preferred taste (though this differs from person to person, of course, one should make sure that the solution is intensely sweet, sour, and spicy, because the taste will be soaked up by the pumpkin)
As necessary and in accordance with personal taste, more canning liquid can be mixed and cooked

Completion
Take the previously marinated pumpkin pieces and bring them to a boil in the canning liquid
Let cook until the pumpkin pieces turn slightly glassy in the margins
Fill the pieces into the clean canning jars
Fill to the rim with the hot canning liquid and the spices
Take the lids (twist-off is best; they should have been boiled before) and close tightly
Let sit at least 14 days before eating (it takes this long for the taste to become really good)

Oysters

2006-12-01T22:06:00.001-05:00

The other day, upon returning from a trip to the Pacific Northwest, we celebrated the thrill of things chilly. We had left town with one red, paunchy suitcase and we flew home with one red suitcase plus one well-insulated brown cardboard box. The suitcase trundled out first onto the luggage carousel, and then we waited intent, willing our box’s trim corners to be the next to shoulder through the black rubber fronds that concede you your baggage. We both held our breath a little, saying nothing, but dually fixed on the worry that our box might be broken open, its innards melting – or worse, that a savvy someone who lived behind those black rubber fronds was tucking into our frosty treasure chest.

We had bought oysters. Bought them, and ventured to travel with them. Traveling with oysters is the mollusk equivalent of egg-and-spoon racing – an attempt to carry a little of the crash and tumble of West coast waters back to the cement shores of the Delaware river. It is an attempt that seems amiably idiotic, loosely genial, yet it is also perverse in its squandering of location, obscene in its decadence. And it is a practice that is fully catered to by the Pike Place Market in Seattle. The fish stalls there brim with braggadocio – the fishmongers yell and toss huge, beautiful fish across counters to each other, catching the whim and wallet of the tourist. If you linger by a pile of shells, they will whip out a small knife and pry you open a clam or an oyster to taste. All the stalls assure you that they can pack their wares for travel, and some will even deliver the aquatic parcels to you at the airport, fully equipped to withstand up to 48 hours in transit; a Pike Place oyster could safely fly all the way around the world.

This is a curiously cosmopolitan end for an oyster, which otherwise lives its entire life anchored to one spot in the ocean. Is it because each oyster is housed in its own, hinged suitcase that they are suggestive of the portable? Or is it the horizon curve of an oyster’s shell, the rugged mountain terrain of its back, the inner seascape, that makes us want to palm and pocket it, like some primordial GPS device, then produce it glistening and triumphant, just in time for a far flung feast?

But maybe our urge to transport them has less to do with the creatures than with their medium. Raised in ice-cold waters, good only in the frosty months, we serve them on beds of ice - it is to ice that they truly belong. And the history of ice has always been – paradoxically for a substance that is the definition of stop-action – the history of transport. Before the invention of refrigeration, snow and ice were the most audacious cargo of all. Their travel and storage were costly folly for empires, aristocrats and their anxious mimics. Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months is a history of the dazzle and excess of ice, and she details the fascination that runs from Medici banquet tables set with ice plates and goblets, to the child compelled to lick an icy pole. She tells the story of a commodity that, across its slow transit, tithed most of itself to summer suns, and of wealthy men who commandeered mountain snowcaps, transporting them to their estates and inverting them into their conical, sunken ice-houses. Nowadays a bag of ice is cheaply bought, but the glint of its melting, wasteful preciousness remains. Wedding planners order up ice statues of swans (a nice touch, given that the swan was the marital interloper between Leda and her husband King Tyndareus), while much-hyped Russian vodkas are served in metropolitan bars made entirely of ice, and ice hotels in Sweden and Canada, which melt away after each season, offer the ultimate getaway for those who prefer their pleasures cold, hard and short-lived.

Catching snowflakes on our tongues for the brief burn of their melting is something we don’t grow out of. So perhaps this is why we flew a pile of oysters across a continent to our friends. And why I eschewed the traditional accompaniment of mignonette in favour of something a little more frigid and crystalline. The tiny dice of shallot in mignonette has often struck me as a disturbingly crunchy interruption to the briny pause of the oyster. I wanted the consummate condiment - an acidic embellishment with no competing texture, something that would slide respectful but brazen into the nakedness of the oyster on the half shell. My solution: granita. Granita is that grainy version of sorbet – inversion, even, since the sorbet-maker is desperate to avoid the ice crystals that distinguish granita. Granita is flavoured ice that you’ve irritated by stirring and scraping or shaving until its shards are revealed. Just as the oyster’s outer garment is all craggy ruffle, the granita has a glorious rasp that bites, just before it melts luxuriously to an intensely flavoured liquid. I made three of them: a bright green cucumber lemon affair, a femme fatale made from white balsamic, and a chile, lime and mint ice spiked with a little fish sauce. Our oysters were of three kinds too: Bluepoints, Kumamoto and a larger, humbler oyster that didn’t even have a name. These last worried me as I opened them – they had hardly any liquor – but when we sat down to dine, they pleased us perfectly well. The Bluepoints and Kumamotos were sweet and sleek, the spoons of granita subsiding into their mix of flesh and liquid.

It has always struck me that the oyster is a creature of diversity – made up of the most pearlescent whites, but frilled with carbon black, some shadowed by dilutions of blue and green. It is muscle and organ and gill and we eat it all. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the oyster may change sex one or more times across its lifespan, occupying its sex distinctly at any given moment, but without commitment. When the Elizabethan Orlando spots the Muscovite who will break his heart, she is dressed in a costume that “disguises the sex,” made of “oyster-coloured velvet.” The two indeterminate young aristocrats are skating over the frozen Thames, at a Frost Fair. The scene beneath the ice forms a narrative of evolutionary motion baffled by stasis: “So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers.” The difference between boy and girl, life and death, the things we think have so much meaning – are suspended here, as immortal androgynes skate the surface of the frozen deep wrapped in oyster-coloured silks. Even age, and the fruits of the Fall, and filthy commerce, are immobilised to make possible Orlando and his lover’s gliding passage. “Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.”

Ice is brutal, numbing, but its suspensions provide clarity. It kills and it preserves. It slows time down. I am more like an old bumboat woman with my skirts full of Eve’s fruit than I am like either the immortal Orlando or the timeless oyster. But I once swam off the coast of the Isle of Mull on a bitter January day. I swam and gasped until my limbs evaporated and I was nothing more than a beating, slowing heart. I felt the thump of myself. My silts and valves. The oyster has filtered freezing waters its whole life, existing in the frozen interstices of time and sex, anchored in the huge swell of the sea. As Eleanor Clark puts it in The Oysters of Locmariaquer, “there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes.”

The oyster has also sifted the tides of fashion and fortune, its own status shifting – sometimes the emblem of luxury and extravagance, it has also been the despised food of the workingman. Many have hailed it as the misshapen emblem of misery and seclusion: Charles Dickens makes the bivalve the analogue of that Christmas-party-pooper Ebenezer Scrooge who is, he tells us, as “Secret and solitary and self-contained as an oyster.” But Scrooge is our measure of change, our lesson in how the hardest heart can be melted – even if only by terror. Like Orlando, the tight oyster Scrooge catches hold of immortality: 'I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!' M.F.K.Fisher, in Consider the Oyster, pities the beast she biographies: “Life is hard, we say. An oyster’s life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation . . .” This oysterly inertia, this liquid dissipation in ossified ugliness, makes people uneasy. It is eerie, that quiver beneath the silent shell that reminds us of stubborn, shameful pleasure-taking. When Shakespeare sees the world in an oyster, it is the thief Pistol who speaks the line, threatening to take what he will: "Why, then the world's mine oyster, / Which I with sword will open." Pistol’s violence and vengeance remind us that the oyster is eaten alive.

But surely the most complete dissipation requires frolicking with that which is ugly and brutal? True bucolic pleasures incorporate the grotesque: they do not spurn it. This is why we see the world in an oyster, and serve it at our feasts. It is in the vile body that we find our revel, and in the sacrifice of it that we face ourselves. The oyster may be a dubious food, but we are a dubious animal and a relish for the oyster is a savouring of the elemental. Its minerality carries the trace of rock and sand upon which we precariously build our lives, and its salinity is of the seas we came from. A friend brought, to our oyster feast, icy Chablis pressed from grapes grown in French vineyards nourished by chalky soil made from age-old oyster shells. In that wine and those oysters, brought together across seasonal and geological stretches of time, and across continental and oceanic measures of distance, we tasted the friable press of ice-ages and their thaws, the pull of moons and tides, and the monstrous shudder of life. And we hoped that we will not – while suspecting that we will – come to say with Oscar Wilde, “the world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.”

SYLLABI: THREE GRANITAS

Chile, Lime and Mint Granita
Recipe from Le Colonial restaurant in San Francisco

2 cups water
2 mint sprigs
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup Asian fish sauce
1 teaspoon chile-garlic sauce (sambal olek)

Bring the water to a boil in a small pot and add the mint. Reduce heat and simmer until the liquid reduces by half. Remove from heat and add the lime juice, sugar and fish sauce. Stir the mixture until the sugar dissolves. Discard the mint sprigs. Add the chile-garlic sauce and mix well.

Transfer the mixture to a stainless-steel or glass pan and place in the freezer. Whisk the mixture every 10 to 20 minutes and continue to freeze until the mixture is consistency of shaved ice, about 2 hours. Break up crystals and whisk before serving.

Cucumber Lemon Granita

2 large English cucumbers, peeled and seeded
1/4 cup water
3 teaspoons aquavit or Hendrick’s Gin
3 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt

Coarsely chop cucumbers and purée in a blender with remaining ingredients in 2 batches until smooth. Taste and adjust flavours to your liking. Pour into an 8- to 9-inch baking pan.
Freeze, stirring and crushing lumps with a fork every hour, until evenly frozen, about 2-3 hours total. Scrape with a fork to lighten texture, crushing any lumps.
Serve immediately or freeze, covered, up to 3 days (rescrape to lighten texture again if necessary).

White Balsamic Granita

Dilute white balsamic by half with water and add a couple of drops of lemon juice. Freeze as above.

Red Ribbon Apple Pie

2006-10-01T22:52:00.000-04:00

Last week I lost an Apple Pie competition. My pie was many days in the making, but still it failed me. I was roundly beaten by Bryn, our department secretary and expert baker, whose beautiful speckled pie – “glory be to God for dappled things!” – ran off with the blue ribbon. Since Bryn took the job in the department, she has kept all of us in the most delicious scones, quiches and other baked goodies. We now turn up to department meetings – held at the cruel, cruel hour of 8:30 am – with a lightness of step and eagerness of eye that can only be conjured up that close to the crack of dawn when there are buttery, flaky treats awaiting. The ride into work is less morose and the meetings themselves are now faintly riotous affairs. Maple-iced oat and walnut scones turn departmental labours into veritable Morris Dances. Under the influence of Bryn’s baking, we are a merry band of fellows and disagreements have come to resemble the stylized conflict of the crossing of willow sticks and the brandishing of pig’s bladders. The plate of scones criss-crosses the table, and we skip back into formation, gaily shaking out our paper napkins and brushing crumbs from our shirtfronts.

This particular morning – the morning that my pie was awarded the bloody red ribbon for second place – was not only an early-to-rise department meeting morning, but also the morning of the recently-inaugurated “County Fair.” The college green had, for several years, hosted a modest spate of stalls with games and foods that go with ketchup. This year they decided to extend these campus revelries still further, even going so far as to hire an honest to goodness bluegrass band. Some eyebrows were raised, but I am a ready wench for fairs. I love them. I’m sure I am descended from a long line of hawkers and hucksters. Or perhaps the Pieman who met Simple Simon a-going to the fair was a progenitor of mine, but if so, I’m sure he’s turning in his pauper’s grave at the thought of my red ribbon. Yes, others might have eschewed the college fair as beneath their professorial dignity, either not attending or walking tweedily around the periphery. Not I. I threw myself in with a sturdy, ruddy-cheeked, milkmaidish, freckled kind of joy. I took hammers to see-saws that flung frogs the colour and feel of Wellington boots into Tupperware ponds. I won a fiercely-competed round of Bingo, rifled through the flea-market and wielded another hammer to crumple an empty soda can into a whimpering disc of its former self. All this while keeping my grip on a smoked turkey leg that was the size of my own femur.

But once I had done the rounds of the various entertainments, I found myself loitering beside the bake-off table, eyeing my yet-to-be-judged pie. Bryn loitered too. We approached each other with the brazen watchfulness of two-year olds in a sand pit (or, perhaps, of ladies at a bake-off). We had both worked out that there were a mere seven pies and that each other’s pie was most likely our stiffest competitor. Blankly, episodically, we exchanged cook’s notes. What kind of crust is that? Ah, all butter. No, no. Mine’s cream cheese. Ah. Much sugar? No, mine neither. Then Bryn asked what kind of apples I had used. When I told her “Cortland, Rhode Island Greening and Smokehouse,” our cool circlings broke down. Where had I found those?! she demanded.

The truth was that although I had woken at 5am – well, technically B had woken at 5am – to crank up the oven to bake the pie, preparations for this pie had begun several days earlier. B and I had traveled with our friends Pim and Lydie to a Pennsylvania National Park one hour west of us, called Hopewell Furnace. Hopewell Furnace is, indeed, a furnace: a foundry that produced iron and iron-products from the late eighteenth century well into the late nineteenth century. The furnace remains, as does the well-appointed owner’s house, and a handful of the smaller but equally musty worker’s cottages. The site also includes an ancient apple orchard – “Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow and plough.” How ancient? No one knows. Like the house that B and I bought in Philadelphia, estates can often only be dated imprecisely from the first bill of sale. Property, it seems, only accrues history when it is sold. Ownership throws the really interesting stuff – building and creating and living – into the shadows. Hopewell Furnace is a place of making, littered with decaying piles of wooden moulds with shapes inverse to their iron product – “And all trades, their gear, and tackle and trim.” But it is only in the first giving up of the full-grown orchard that we can infer its careful planting, some long ago spring. The first mention of the Hopewell Furnace orchard is found in an advertisement of sale placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette on April 2, 1788. The advert describes “an excellent young bearing orchard of about 250 apple trees of the best fruit.” That orchard, although not the same trees, still stands today. Pennsylvania, William Penn’s Woods, is home to some of the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, giants older (and longer-lived?) than the U.S. Constitution. But fruit trees do not live as long as oaks and sycamores. The park replanted the apple-trees in 1942, and then again in 1960. They preserved the style of an old orchard and also preserved over 25 historic varieties of apple. These apples look like fairy tales: red as blushes, or green as river-reeds and, unlike any store-bought apple, their beautiful skins are mottled – “rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” Not bruised or blemished, but complex, almost sinister. Some of these apples are as small as a gasp, and all of them are crisp and tightly packed.

Last year, B and I had been led to Hopewell Furnace by our dear friend Jen Roder, a finish carpenter turned rebel silversmith, who knows all about the salvaging of good things. We’d gone late in the season and so had our pick of only the less punctual breeds: the syrupy Turley Winesaps and Staymans, and the thick-jacketed Roxbury Russets. This year, I was determined to make both an early and a late visit, so we could sample more apples. This time we found Cortlands and Gravensteins, Grimes Goldens and early Romes. Smokehouse apples, whose original tree grew up next to a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania smokehouse in 1837. These look like the whispery negative of the Kodachrome Granny Smith. They also look much like the Rhode Island Greening, which in addition to actually being green was started from seed in the 1650s by Mr. Green, the tavern owner in Green’s End, Rhode Island.

The park provides you with long poles with apple-grabbing baskets attached to their ends, and a map of all the trees. I handed over the business of orchard orienteering to B. She has a knack for navigation anyway, and when very little, she dealt with the bent-over benevolence of the adult inquiry, “and what do you want to be when you grow up?” by answering “an apple tree.” She led me and Pim and our buckets to a tree, and we chomped into a representative fruit to determine whether or not it was worth our attentions. If it was, B left me and Pim picking and tramped off to other rows, scouting out our next bounty. I most wanted her to find an apple tree called, simply, “Unknown.” The map showed only one of these trees, at the very edge of the orchard, and finally B found it. An antediluvian monster with only a few apples high up in its boughs, the tree was clearly in the act of spreading its venerable shade for the last time. But Pim reckoned that, like grape vines, a dying tree produces the sweetest of harvests. I had been particularly ambitious to collect these Unknowns, convinced that their mystery was assurance of their superiority, but Pim’s swan-song thesis is probably the right one. I bit into one of the pale yellow fruits, and it rewarded me with a lemony sharp tang and lingering vegetal afterglow unlike any other apple I’ve ever tried – “With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.”

Not that we could really keep track of our harvest. Despite my bureaucratic bag-arranging and wielding of a permanent marker, those tricky little apples would deceive us – “fickle, freckled – who knows how?” There would be a rogue tree not mapped, or the apple we were sure was the Grimes Golden first raised by Thomas Grimes in 1832 in Virginia, would turn out to be the Gravenstein, believed to have come from the private garden of the Duke of Augustenberg in Schleswig-Holstein. Dizzied by tastings, warmed by a September sun, we soon lost track of these most lost of breeds and simply picked and picked and picked some more. At only 75 cents a pound, we could think of no reason not to go completely hog wild. Meanwhile Lydie had wandered off into the woods and unearthed a single chanterelle and several Roman-purple mushrooms. In search of a Mother (the apple, not the parent), Pim stumbled on a multitude of black walnuts, and he and B gathered them all. B, who trotted into the woods after our picnic lunch in hopes of learning about mushrooms, found a small turtle burrowing under a fallen log. She did not bring him back for me to admire, but assured me that he could not possibly have been Herman.

Back at our row-house, I set about making pie. I used my beloved cream-cheese pastry recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s invaluable, if scarily comprehensive, Pie and Pastry Bible. This recipe is more complicated than you think pastry should be – much more fiddly than the floury pastry -making Sundays of my youth – but the better for it. The result is operatically flaky, and as Rose wisely intones, is crust not the whole point of pie? I grated nutmegs into stumps, and added a couple of pinches of clove to Rose’s recipe, to commemorate the vicious surprise of the whole cloves my mother would sink into her apple pies. I also held back on the cinnamon because I have never taken to the American habit of shoveling that spice into pies, sticky buns and chewing gum. My cinnamon reticence, along with my light hand with the sugar, B theorizes, may have cost me the blue ribbon; I was not appealing to an American palate. But B is merely trying to save my dignity. I will be more honest with you. My next move, I now believe, was the fatal one: after making the pie, and crimping down its lid, I froze it raw. Rose tells me that this is the secret to the crispest of all bottom crusts, and I have followed her loyally for peach pies, and strawberry rhubarb ones and berry pies of all kinds, and I know her to speak the truth. Rose’s crisp bottoms are a marvel. So I thumbed through her Pie Bible again to check that she recommended it for apple pies, and it seemed she did. I froze the pie. Baking it from frozen early that morning took an age, but it crisped perfectly and as we drove to college, I held it proudly on my lap, torturing my car-pool with its aroma.

It looked handsome on the judging table, which was ignored by all County Fair revelers, but staked out by Bryn and me. Looks, however, are not enough, or at least could give me no advantage here, since Bryn’s pie was stunning. Nor, apparently, do antique apples guarantee a girl an edge. In fact, it turns out that while I was mooning over the venerable names of my apples, Bryn had used an apple called “83”- a gift from an orcharding friend who had invented it. This new kid on the block turned out to be delicious, but failed to live up to the brutal shelf-life requirements of supermarket distributors and so was granted no name at all. It, too, is “Unknown,” perched, anonymous, at another chronological extremity. Bryn’s unbranded apple and her deft hand carried off the Blue Ribbon. Then that same deft hand hung the trophy on the office pinboard I pass every day. But we are not done yet, dear reader. If an orchard can last 200 hundred years, how much longer do baking rivalries? I have learned from my mistakes: I baked another two pies that week – one from frozen and one fresh. The moral was very plain: do not follow the freeze-first rule with apple pie! An apple pie must be baked from fresh to keep the texture of its apples and a chance of glory at next year’s County Fair.

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).

SYLLABUS: RED RIBBON APPLE PIE

Pastry

Unsalted butter, cold 6oz
Pastry flour 10oz
Salt 1/2 tsp
Baking powder 1/4 tsp
Cream cheese, cold 41/2 oz
Ice water 2-4 tblsp
Cider vinegar 1 tblsp

Method

Cut butter into 3/4” cubes and freeze for at least 30 minutes.
Mix flour, salt and baking powder and freeze for at least 30 minutes.
Put flour mixture into food processor and process for a few seconds to combine.
Cut cream cheese into 4 pieces and add to flour. Process for about 10 seconds.
Add frozen butter cubes and pulse until none of the butter is larger than the size of a large pea.
Add water and vinegar, pulse until butter is reduced to the size of small peas. Adjust water until the mixture only just holds together when pinched (it will still be crumbly, and not holding together in a mass).
Spoon mixture into large plastic bag and squeeze and press with heal of hand or knuckles until it comes together in one piece.

Flatten into two discs, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 45 minutes – or overnight.

Filling

Baking apples 21/2 pounds when peeled and cored
Lemon juice 1 tblsp
Light brown sugar 2 oz
Granulated sugar 13/4 oz
Ground cinnamon 1 tsp
Freshly grated nutmeg 1/2 tsp
Ground cloves 1/4 tsp
Salt 1/4 tsp
Unsalted butter 1 oz
Cornstarch 0.5 oz

Method

Roll out bottom crust and line Pyrex pan. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Slice apples 1/4 inch thick. Thinly sliced apples fill the pie pan more neatly. In a large bowl, combine apples, lemon juice, sugars and spices and salt and toss to mix. Macerate for 30 mins-3 hrs. Collect the juices by putting apples in colander. Toss remaining apples with cornstarch until it disappears. The apples will have released about 1/2 cup liquid. In a small saucepan, boil down the juices and the butter, over medium-high heat. Swirl but do not stir. When it has caramelized and reduced to about 1/3 cup, remove from heat and pour over apples. Do not worry if it hardens, it will dissolve again during baking.

Put apples in bottom crust. Roll out top crust into a 12 inch circle and place on top. Wet the rim of the bottom crust and fold the top crust over the bottom rim, tucking it under. Crimp edges and make 5 slashes radiating out from the centre of the pie.

Pre-heat oven to 425F, cover a baking stone or baking sheet with foil and put it on a rack set at the lowest level. Set the pie directly on top of this foil and cook pie for 45-55 mins, or until pie is golden, including bottom crust, and the juices have bubbled up through the slashes. If the edges start to overbrown, protect with foil.

Cool the pie on a rack for at least 4 hours before cutting, so that it will hold its shape.

Avocado Ecstasy

2006-09-15T22:30:00.000-04:00

A few days ago the snub-nosed white FedEx truck squealed to a halt outside our house and delivered a dented and sagging brown cardboard box. It was from Florida. Cross-legged on the floor beside it, B and I dug in, ripping off packing tape and scrabbling like two raccoons through the scrunched up newspaper inside. Nested in that box were twelve or thirteen mammoth fruits that looked like they had been delivered from another solar system. Avocados. But unlike any avocado I have ever seen before. Shaped like tear-drops with full, plump underbellies, they were each a good 7 or 8 inches long. We know this because I ran to the kitchen and got my fridge-magnet-tape-measure off the fridge to verify the data. Popped onto the scales, they each weighed in at a mighty 2 pounds and more. Glossy and green, with a russet blush, they made me remember that I grew up calling their smaller black cousins “avocado pears.” I had not realised that I had shed “pear” from my vocabulary during my sojourn in this country, but one glance at these fulsome fruits recalled the term I had sloughed off.

This outlandish bounty was sent to us by B’s brother who has recently moved to Florida. His new house has several avocado trees in its garden, and he knew that we would revel in his harvest. I have often fantasised about signing up for those services that deliver you perfect, seasonal, hand-selected fruits through the post. So it is quite dreamy to have ones very own brother-in-law provide it from his very own avocado trees. B was also delighted, but less amazed. Her older brother has always been an ace gift giver. She reminded me that it was Paul who first encouraged her to apprentice herself to the culinary arts. Her college graduation present from him was a beautiful Wusthof chef’s knife that still slices and dices in our kitchen, a bag of Arborio rice, a package of dried porcinis, and a risotto cookbook.

It turns out that avocados, like many other delightful veggies, are a New World comestible. They come in three regional varieties: Mexican, Guatemalan, and Caribbean. The Hass avocado, the little black nubbly one that most of us know best, is a variant of the Mexican strain, which are small and rich and oily, tasting slightly of toasted almonds. The huge Caribbean avocados that Paul sent us are not so unctuous, and have a clear, glassy taste. Because they are less buttery, they don’t take so well to mashing, so no guacamole. They slice, however, into elegant cross-sections, watery beads appearing on their surface, and each slice shades from lime green to a slightly sullen yellow. The flavour is more subtle, and lighter on the tongue than the Mexican avocado, but exquisitely delicious. I realised, as I let the first bite fill my mouth with that salady taste, that I had purchased a Caribbean avocado before. But that shop-bought one was depressingly watery, so I had reverted immediately to the Hass hegemony. The wateriness of Paul’s freshly FedExed fruits, however, was refreshing, the taste almost translucent. B and I piled the enormous avocados into our capacious enamel washbasin and spent the week sharing an avocado a day, in variations on the simple salad. We watched the skins turn more and more russet and tasted the flesh become more and more perfect. Guests who dropped by our house left, happy paleontologists, carrying large reptilian eggs.

The avocado not only looks prehistoric, but may indeed be so. Many experts believe that avocado trees were on the earth, at least in what we now call California, about 50 million years ago and that avocados were savoured by dinosaurs, who popped them into their gullets like boiled sweets, assuring avocado propagation by subsequently depositing the large pits from their other ends. The Lords of the Earth, it turns out, were little more than lumbering, gastric potato planters.

And if dinosaurs pooped them out, the association of the avocado pear with the nether regions has only continued. The English word “avocado” is a corruption of a Nahuatl word, “ahuacatl,” meaning “Testicle Tree.” Which is where my almost-forgotten addition of “pear” to “avocado” comes roaring back; pears in general enjoy this saucy equivalency. “The Merchant’s Tale,” one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, features some very impressive pear tree “swyving.” In it, a lovely virgin named May is betrothed to a elderly knight named January who up to that point had simply “folwed ay his bodily delyt / On wommen, ther as was his appetyt.” He starts to get a little nervous that all this out-of-wedlock fun and games is not good for his soul, and given that he’s pretty much at death’s door, he thinks that marrying a virtuous lassie will be just the ticket for eleventh hour salvation. But his graduation from hussies to vernal virgins doesn’t go so well. One of January’s attendants, Damian, takes a fancy to young May and wastes away for the love of her. January, who is quite partial to handsome Damian, sends May to sit by Damian’s sick-bed and tend to him. While May and the not-so-sick-after-all Damian pass love notes, January is suddenly stricken blind. His blindness makes him stick tight to May, but despite this she manages to slip Damian a wax impression of a key to January’s secret garden, and signals to Damian to break and enter and climb the pear tree.

May then leads January to the pear tree and pretends that she has an insatiable lust for one of the small green fruits. She tells her old, blind husband to bend over to let her climb up on his back. Sporting a smock, she clambers into the tree “That charged was with fruyt,” where “Damian/Gan pullen up the smok, an in he throng.” Goodness gracious me. Lust for pears and lust for Damian’s throngings, my blushing high-school English teacher managed to convey, become one and the same through the – “underline it, girls!” – “SYMBOLISM of the pear.”

I feel she needn’t have waggled her eyebrows so hard to convey what the pear can symbolise if only she had invoked the avocado pear instead. We were a classroom of, now I come to think of it, yellow and green uniformed girls, all of us born in the early seventies. We knew that the slick flesh of an avocado pear was intimately connected to our parents’ sense of themselves as the Joy of Sex Generation. The Joy of Sex, a naughty riff on The Joy of Cooking, and later subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, was first published in the year of my birth. It is organised like a menu with "Sauces and Pickles" and "Main Courses." I am, simply, proud to share my nativity with a book that sutures defiantly hairy sex and food in this way. As a teenager, I would only accept baby-sitting gigs at houses that I knew had this text crammed under the bedside table. I can't recall if avocados were featured specifically, but stuffed with nakedly pink prawns, and draped in cocktail sauce, the halved avocado pear was for me the essence of sultry 70s sophistication. It was served by other people's mothers who sashayed in kaftans or lounge suits across smoky rooms hung with bamboo wallpaper. That was an era that championed the wearing of satin pyjamas to dinner parties, an era that called that avocado-prawn dish a “cocktail,” and I longed to join the fun. Those days are gone. The Joy of Sex is now depilated beyond all recognition, nobody smokes anymore and only my students seem to wear - rumpled cotton - pyjamas in public. But perhaps the avocado pear can smuggle to us (as through the belly of a dinosaur) the seed of more glam times.

Venison Burgers

2006-08-29T23:42:00.000-04:00

This past weekend we stocked our small city garden with friends and an old enamel washbasin filled with ice and good Philadelphia beers – Dogfish and Yards – and then we grilled a pile of burgers. Not beefburgers, and certainly not turkey burgers: ours were venison burgers. I love this purple-red meat and its winy flavour. But there is, perhaps, no food that more insistently reveals the divide between the country of my birth, and the country I now live in. Venison, in other words, means very differently here and there, and it always has. In England, venison is iconically bound to the brutalities of the hunting class. Poaching used to be punished with deportation and sometimes even death, and many ancient ballads follow the adventures and ultimate tragic fate of the bold poacher. Jonathan Swift got the association just right when he wrote, in that timelessly horrible and hilarious tract, “A Modest Proposal,” that English landowners who had squandered their herds would be happy to dine instead on the tender flesh of Irish children: “A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased in discoursing on this matter to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service.”

When the English came to the Americas, they were so used to hunting being a sporting pastime of the leisured class, that they entirely misunderstood Native hunting practices. Indian men, whose unsurpassed hunting skills were essential to the survival of their people, were seen as lazy by English settlers who thought the Indians were enjoying one big holiday. But then again, part of the great lure of the New World for the English poor – whose poaching derring-do is most satisfyingly portrayed in Roald Dahl’s Danny Champion of the World– was the promise that wild meat was not only plentiful, but legally his who killed it. Thus the chapter-long description in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers of how the young hero refuses to sell his deer to the wealthy landowner. The young man explains that the profound relationship between the animal and the hunter proves the hunter’s personhood, a personhood that cannot be overridden by niggling objections regarding ownership of land or readiness of cash.

Perhaps my own emigration was motivated by the same fantasy. I certainly remember a strange surge of feeling the first time I held a piece of wild American venison, wrapped in wax paper, in my hand. I had been fed, in undergraduate days in England, upon the deer who clustered, fenced, behind the college. But then, in Vermont, my neighbour John and his son, Johnny, brought me a venison roast they’d bagged just over there, on our property line. John told the tale of how they’d both fallen asleep on their tummies on the granite rock overlooking the hill, waking to find the animal staring at them, not fifteen feet away. As I received that package and the story that accompanied it, I knew that I was not, so to speak, in Kansas anymore. Not only was the venison free to the hunter, but the hunter felt free to make a gift of it to me. Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free! I will shower venison steaks upon them!

My association of venison with ancient English property laws was finally fully severed for me this year, when I was given so much venison I had no idea what to do with it. A former student, Shannon, had taken several classes with me and across the course of teaching her about literature I had somehow betrayed myself as a glutton. She wrote to me at the beginning of semester offering me venison that she’d salvaged before her mother “literally fed it to the dogs.” I practically strapped an emergency siren to the top of my little red car, and sped to the pick-up point. There stood Shannon. She opened the trunk of her car to reveal the biggest cooler in the universe, chock full of packaged deer meat. It felt more like a scene from The Sopranos than a tender moment in Dead Poets Society, that’s for sure.

Shannon, an Iowa lass and a farmer’s daughter, explained that deer are so overpopulated in her state, that hunting quotas are high. All the men in her family hunt, and the meat was too plentiful for her family to enjoy it indefinitely. I was ecstatic. In the US, you cannot buy good venison because you can’t purchase the meat of wild animals killed by hunters: this meat can only be gifted. A hunting friend from my time in Vermont explained that even when you find commercial venison, too often it has been badly butchered. Venison fat is unpleasantly gamey and has the consistency of tallow. Any trace of it left on the meat will stick to your teeth and the roof of your mouth as if you’d chewed on an old candle. So to eat good venison in this country you have to be part of or close to hunting culture: to generations-old skills of tracking, killing and butchering. US venison, like so little other US meat, is self-sourced, plentiful sustenance.

My venison, if not exactly self-sourced, was so plentiful that I had to summon all my own native foraging skills and . . . buy a freezer. I had long planned the snagging of a full freezer, and had been blocked every time by B., who closely monitors the proliferation of kitchen paraphernalia in our house. A gleeful side-effect of the venison windfall was that now there could be no objection to my plan. No more stuffing things into the glorified icecube-compartment of my fridge. I hopped onto the internet and ordered up a life-sized full-on freezer, which arrived one short day later and the nice delivery men hobbled it down the basement stairs. It had barely had time to crank up its freon, when I surprised it with package upon package of venison, some of it steaks, some of it summer sausage, but much of it ground.

Since so much of it was ground I have experimented with using venison in ways I would not have credited. I have tried meatballs, both Swedish and Italian, and Bolognese sauces, and Shepherd-turned-Huntsman Pies, and sausages too. Often I sought out recipes that asked for veal and replaced it with venison, savouring the foresty flavour it contributed. When it comes to meat, I am used to searching out flavour through its fat – deliberately choosing cuts of beef that show marbling, and refusing to trim the luxurious fat and skin away from pork. But venison is different – although insistently flavourful, it is earnestly lean. It comes from an animal that has spent its life leaping and zig-zagging through landscapes, and this lithe a beast provides, of course, the leanest of meats.

Because it is not rich in its own fat, making a burger from venison requires the addition of other fat. Fatback is one option, mixing the meat with some ground beef is another. This time, I used just a few hefty slices of Pennsylvania smoked bacon that I found at the Fair Foods stand – enough to hint at smoky flavour but not enough to dominate. With its deep ribbons of white fat cut into small dice, it helped ease the dry, compact venison into burger form. For seasoning, I chose the flavours that feature in more formal venison recipes: some juniper berries, some rosemary needles, garlic and thyme. All of this chopped or ground fine, I mixed it into almost 5 pounds of meat in a large bowl, throwing in an egg to help bind it. These ingredients I sourced from my garden, or Fair Foods, but for salt, I went further afield and used some of my much-prized Halen Môn sea salt. Halen Môn produces organic salt from the clean, cold seawaters around the Isle of Anglesey, Wales. They sell a version of this beautiful white salt that is smoked until it is slate gray over Welsh oak chippings, and it is divine. I usually use this salt with pork or fish – they recommend eating it with gull and quail eggs and someday I will do that too. It was not going to show up as distinctly in these burgers, given that I was already using smoked bacon, but nevertheless I felt it was the right salt with which to honor the meat.

I bought some Pennsylvania Noble cheese – a muscular, aged cheddar from around here. Tomatoes – big, red beefsteak tomatoes with a classic air to them - came from the Amish farmers at the market, and would be accompanied by green frills of local lettuce and rings of red onion. I whisked up some mayonnaise from bright orange egg yolks, starting with a dab of Dijon mustard in the bottom of my bowl and watching for the emulsifying moment, holding that thick gloss firm with a steady combination of whisking and drizzling. I’ve never had any luck making mayonnaise in a food processor – the blades seem to turn it bitter – so this is another of those jobs for which I adopt a Luddite stance. A few days earlier, I had made jars of pickles from the stout, skittle-sized cucumbers grown in my neighbour Michele’s garden. I’d never tried making pickles before, and Michele made it easy, giving me a complete pickle kit in the form of the requisite vegetable, her recipe, half a bag of pickling spice and the tip to eat them earlier than the recipe says, so that they are still more cucumbery than pickley.

Condiments are one thing, but then there was the question of the bun. A burger needs a good one. And it was within the bun that the mystical limit – the point of obsession - lurked. A bun must yield to its burger, but also reassure it. It must be the cushion under the burger’s bottom and the hat on its head. Although I do not oppose ways of getting fancy with burger buns - making them crusty, turning them into English muffins, etc. - there is also something fabulous about a classically soft and sweetish burger bun. The kind I ate at school bbqs under umbrellas or on crisp, black Fifth of November evenings when Britons gather around bonfires in mittens, lighting fireworks (taking off their mittens first) and immolating effigies of a brave man who tried to blow up a king. Remember, remember the Fifth of November – and pass the ketchup! But the kind of burger bun I want to raise in honor of Guy Fawkes or anybody else for that matter, has to be torn from its friends in the batch, soft shreds of comradeship marking its sides. It has to be giving enough to leave fingertip impressions from your two-handed grasp and willing enough to sop up your condiments.

Luckily, my bread guru, Nancy Silverton, understands all these needs and expresses them fully in the introduction to her hamburger bun recipe. Made with both sourdough starter and yeast, this buttery, eggy dough takes three days and is worth every minute. The buns round and puff deliciously, but also turn out flat enough that you can stuff heaps of accompaniments in along with your burger without having to then unhinge your jaw to eat the thing.

Our evening rounded out nicely too. We lit oil lamps, stuck our feet up on chairs and one guest nestled in the hammock. We followed the burgers with two kinds of ice-cream made from local fruit: a rosy peach and a conspiratorially purple blackberry. Each ice-cream had just a touch of liqueur in it to keep it soft and to remind us that the nip of autumn – and hunting season – is just around the corner.

Minestrone

2006-08-17T19:22:00.000-04:00

The first thing I ever remember cooking was a bucket of mud soup that I fed to my younger brother. Despite being an instrument of torture, this dish was a model of eating locally, with the ingredients at hand. The two of us had been sent out into the garden in our matching anoraks to play with the tortoise, Herman. There were, it later transpired, several versions of Herman across our childhood, although at the time we weren’t informed of this, and I therefore can't really say whether this was Herman I, II or III.

The first two Hermans had death wishes. Herman the First didn't wake up from hibernation, and was, I now understand, simply replaced by a quick trip to the pet store. Herman II did wake up, only to emerge from his winter home and tumble to his death from the high, white cliff that yawned at his doorstep; his hibernation box had been placed on top of the dryer. But David and I were not told of this tragic leap until much later. Instead, another dash to the pet store was made, probably by my father, and one day we were told that Herman had finally awoken! That my brother and I did not question the identity of Herman III does not speak well of our cognitive abilities. Our langorous friend Herman had been a fossil with legs, for whom a day's hard labour involved looking right and then, if he was up to it, looking left. I must admit that we thought very little of Herman. Until suddenly, he became a positively scintillating pet, whose every movement hinted at the freedoms of the wild.

From our perspective, Herman took his winter nap and awoke as the speediest, most beady-eyed tortoise known to humankind. Herman III was not only accelerated but adventurous to boot. His predecessors were happy to live in the little tortoise house, with its flat roof made from asphalt trimmings, and emerge only when tempted with slices of cucumber, which they would dispatch, in a bureaucratic manner, with the sideways action of a pink tongue. They were tortoises who had become real Little Englanders, content with the blandness of a comfortable life, irked only if the neighbors peeped over the hedges. Herman III, on the other hand, not only got a leg on, but had places to go and bedding plants to eat. He tried everything. First in our garden, and when that King Buffet caused ennui, he moved on to the neighbours'. Born under a wandering and hungry star, Herman III made his way through stretch after stretch of suburban garden, burrowing a modest underpass whenever he was met by a fence.

It was a chilly business, trailing up and down the street, knocking on front doors and asking people, who clearly considered Other Human Contact an affront, whether they'd seen our tortoise or whether their primped gardens showed the effects of tortoise dining. But of course Herman III’s wanderlust had stirred love in our hearts. A rake, even a reptilian one, is always attractive to cabin'd, cribb'd and confined young people, and my brother and I felt a yearning sort of thrill in Herman’s explorations of the back gardens of Orpington, Kent. But one regretful day, we were informed that Measures Had to be Taken. Our father appeared with a drill, and proceeded, against our shrill protestations, to put a hole through the hem of Herman's lovely shell and attach him with a long chain to a stake near his little ranch house. Utterly unconvinced by the parental assurance that Herman was unharmed by the operation, we could barely conceal our delight when the next day the shackled Herman climbed onto his flat roof and hurled himself from it with such vigor that he wrenched his stake free. My brother and I watched, silent and conspiratorial, as Herman ambled off, his chain dragging behind him, a veritable Magwitch in the marshes. He who returns must, however, be doubly repressed, and upon capture Herman’s tortoise dignity was further sacrificed. My father got out a paint pot and Herman's pierced shell was daubed with our address in big white letters. Now on days of disappearance, we simply sat at home, eating dinner and listening for the knock at our door and the latest tortoise delivery.

Perhaps all that Herman desired was to taste the horticultural offerings of others: he was migrant because he was a gastronome. Or maybe he became a gastronome because of his taste for migrancy. All I know for sure is that my brother and I were not allowed to wander beyond our regularly creosoted fencing, and I, at least, was fascinated by food and its pleasures from a very early age. Forced to cook locally, I forced my brother to eat locally. I had a red bucket, there was a tiny circular pond that my father had dug and lined with a rubber guard. Give a child a stick, and she will find some good-looking soil, go in search of "herbs" and get to stirring. Bits of pansy, twitches of alyssum, a judicious blade or two of good lawn grass - I had the makings of a pretty delicious looking brew. We sat on our two designated sawn-off tree trunks, and at my urgings, my brother became my first dinner guest. This meal may also have been the origin of the strange, un-chefly habit I have of not tasting the food I cook until it is on the table - who can say? I don't have any recollection of my brother's assessment of this first soup of mine, but I daresay he does.

I have progressed since then. Like Herman, I have done some wandering, even if my chain still clanks noisily behind me. I have fallen in love with different cuisines one new garden plot at a time. I tarried a good while in the cookbook-less phase of life, spending my undergraduate years throwing random things into under-washed pots and seeing what happened. Then I hurled myself in the other direction, amassing cookbooks, relishing each new world they opened up, and following their instructions with evangelical zest. The middle road – a little of each approach – is the one I usually pick. But sometimes I am so torn between pre-planning a menu and just going to the market and seeing what I find, that I go equipped with a recipe book or two. On more than one occasion this havering has ended with me leaving my recipe book in a shopping basket or on a bench – a gift, I suppose, for another forager. Dithering in the face of enormous bounty is, of course, a quintessentially bourgeois bind, and the solution (to so many other things, as well) is to make peasant food.

Ever since making this year's pesto alla Genovese, I have been thinking of the summer minestrone I once made. It has only been half on my mind, and I hadn't quite planned it, when I spotted cranberry beans in the market this morning. These must surely be the most enchanting of beans, pretty enough to be the ones that made Jack give up his cow. Cranberry beans bulge glossy white and pink, as if one colour is the topcoat, flaked off, the other the undercoat broken through - but it remains their secret which is which. Upon cooking, the colour fades to nothing, the mottle soaked away in the broth, but like any good disappearing act, ripples of magic remain.

I happily filled a shopping bag with the beautiful pods – creamy white and pink just like the beans inside – and tried to remember what else had been in my minestrone past. Pesto topped it off, and this I knew I had. A parmesan crust gets simmered in this soup, and I always salvage mine for this purpose, merrily disregarding the fact that I produce rinds in far greater bulk than I produce minestrone. Chicken broth formed its base, and along with the giant freezer bag of vegetable odds and ends that I keep for making stock, I almost always have blocks of stock itself in my deep-freeze, an icy tally of roast chicken dinners consumed. The rest I wasn't sure of, so I wandered home clutching my bag of beans, intent on leafing through my recipe books.

Back at the ranch, I surrounded myself with a stack of cookbooks and revived with a glass of assam and rose iced tea. The rosebuds were a gift from my friend Dianna who procures me delicious floral teas from China - chrysanthemum and green tea and jasmine balls that bloom into flowers (again), as they steep in water - or dragonwell tea: each is more of a teacup-sized miracle than the last. My stack of books told me a story of no recipe at all. Clifford A. Wright reminded me that Genoese-style minestrone is a soup that changes with the seasons and "is the quintessential meal of cucina povera" because it uses what is to hand. My beloved bean recipe book, The Bean Bible, by Philadelphia food wizard Aliza Green - of whom a journalist memorably and rightly proclaimed "she could make a snow tire taste good" - reminded me that I had everything I could want of a summer minestrone right there in my fridge. Her recipe uses just yellow squash and zucchini and tomatoes and leeks. Leeks I didn't have, but some mild, sweet "Red Long of Tropea" onions remained from my farm share, and since they are an Italian - Calabrian - onion, I was sure my soup would be amenable. Everything else - the squashes, some green beans - had been left to me by a neighbour who had gone on holiday and I'd found a carrier bag of her garden goodies on my doorstep early one morning not so long ago. Sometimes the garden comes to you.

Minestrone means "big soup" and today that's what we had for lunch: an expansive bowl of gifted, salvaged and lit upon ingredients. Immediate vegetables, seasoned with the stored up flavours of sauce and stock, a product of both wanderings and sitting put - all I needed to complete the pleasure would have been the companionship of Herman III. But Herman III finally wandered off for good one day. Perhaps he found his way into the garden of his dream, reformed, and settled down. But I hope not. A true gastronome carries his home with him – it is his tongue and his heart and his imagination – and I hope Herman wanders still. Tortoises, after all, are old as the hills -- and will those crabby feet, in future times, walk upon England’s mountains green?

SYLLABUS: HERMAN’S SUMMER MINESTRONE
Serves 4 hungry people well

1 pound shelled fresh cranberry beans
1/2 pound fresh green beans, sliced on the diagonal
1 pound fresh tomatoes, blanched, peeled, seeded and chopped
2 small red onions sliced
8 cups or 4US pints or 3.5 UK pints chicken stock
1/2 pound yellow squash, cut into half moons
1/2 pound of small zucchini, cut into half moons
handful of parsley, chopped
1/4 pound of any small pasta shape
Parmesan rind
Olive oil
Equal quantities of Parmesan-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano, grated

Put the onion, chopped parsley and a little olive oil in a stock pot and sauté gently for just a few minutes.
Add the stock, the cranberry beans, the tomatoes and the parmesan rind. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until the beans are tender. Skim off any foam that might rise to the surface.
Add the green beans, the yellow squash, the zucchini and the pasta and return to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the pasta is cooked and the green beans tender. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve and top with a generous spoon of pesto, a drizzle of olive oil, some grinds of black pepper and the grated cheese on the side.

Aliza Green, whose recipe served as the basis for mine, serves her Summer Minestrone with zucchini blossoms stirred in just before serving – if you have them, do it! Borage is also a traditional flavouring.

Leeks, mushrooms, celery, carrots, potatoes, eggplant, fava beans and greens are all to be found in other minestrone recipes, so substitute in vegetables as you like.

Tea Eggs

2006-08-06T17:48:00.000-04:00

One of the only sadnesses I have about living in Philadelphia, in my elderly brick row house with its pocket handkerchief garden, is my lack of chickens. I would love to have a couple of chickens running about, but I’m a few inches and one city ordinance short of being able to do that. I had a flutter of hope on the matter when my aunt, who lives in Birmingham England, brought me up to speed on a new lodging option for the urban chicken: the Eglu. The Eglu is a “modern home” for the chicken who chooses the city life, a recyclable groovy plastic pod-house complete with an “eggport” for easy egg collection. Always a fan of the Frank Lloyd Wright design favourite, the carport, I am even more on board with the notion that every house needs an eggport. My beloved has often observed that my most romantic feelings are reserved for food, and it’s true that I go misty over the idea of nestling a freshly laid, soon to be boiled, egg in my palm. The mere sight of one of those Araucuna sea-glass coloured eggs sends me into a small swoon.

I admire the chicken as a citizen, too. I have no time for a clingy animal – I like one that has a life to live and just gets on with that alongside you. The chicken has much to recommend it on this score. The constant rummaging and wanderings off. The slightly dotty independence. The old-lady-like beady beakiness, that certain canniness beneath the cardigan. I have a sense that I would like their brand of sociality. In her youth, B was friends with a chicken, a red hen who was a refugee from a primary school egg-hatching experiment. Her brother brought the chick home and it became, like B, another unit in a large and diverse household that was a home, a parsonage, and a half-way house for people who were experiencing life’s flux, grateful for the chance to annex themselves to someone else’s family. B has many tales of these characters, my personal favourite being the bunch of Buddhist monks who lived in her basement. In the midst of this rich tapestry, the red hen and B clearly found some refuge in each other and there is a photograph of the 3-year old B with her arms clasped around the chicken, who is almost as big as herself. They are both gazing intently into the camera, like Victorians who have immobilized themselves for the technology. It is a portrait of good friends. Two runners around who are usually seen out of the corners of everyone else’s eye, and who found each other in the scratchy patches of garden they prefer.

The Eglu seemed like the opportunity to revisit such calmly symbiotic human-beast relations. Specifically designed for people with limited space, you and your chicken can choose the right Eglu to match your décor too: it comes in red, pink, blue, orange or green. If Toad of Toad Hall, that “charming sociopath,” as Alison Bechdel brilliantly summed him up in Fun Home, can have a canary yellow horse-drawn gipsy caravan, then surely our chicken comrades should be given the option of a little colour in their lives, too.

We, of course, get the pleasure of gazing on the chicken’s own magnificent palette. Not only are the colours of its plumage a sheer delight, but this is an animal with real style and both fashion-forwardness and retro-chic. Some breeds recall the era of mods and rockers, some are pure fluffy punk, others look like they have Italian leather trim – that brassy Gucci glam – and more than one kind looks like it patronises the same milliner as the late Queen Mum. If the visuals don’t appeal, the names must: Scots Dumpy; Frizzle; Cream Legbar; Gold Legbar; Speckledy; Welsummer; Nankin; Appenzeller. The red-combed Orpington Buff holds a special place in my heart given that it was first bred in my home town, but the chickens of my choice would have been the Gingernut Ranger and Miss Pepperpot. Their names proclaim a dedication to the culinary, and I feel we would have gotten along famously. “Would have,” because sadly it cannot be.

Even the Eglu needs a yard that is 20 x 30’ and mine is only 16 x 12’. Besides, in 2004, the City of Philadelphia passed an ordinance that bans farm animals from city spaces. This is truly a sad thing for the city that began life as William Penn’s vision of a “green country towne.” It turns out that this legislation may have been pushed through to try and deal with some people with full-blown “Pet Rescue” situations in their backyard, but it comes down hard on several populations. Anyone with any kind of urban farm initiative has been affected, as have Hispanic and Asian households who have a culture of chicken-keeping, and there’s no grandfather clause for someone with a beloved chicken or goat companion. It seems that there may be a loophole for anyone who uses their poultry for “educational purposes” and I have a toddler lined up for chicken and egg tutorials should I gain some more yard space anytime soon. B and I have post-ship-coming-in plans for the building of a vast roof deck, for which we have all kinds of wild-eyed dreams including a tomato farm, several fig trees and a Japanese hot tub. Perhaps, we thought, an Eglu or two would complete the scene? There is, on the other hand, the strong possibility that despite the Eglu’s “modern twin-walled polymer insulation,” rooftop Philadelphia summers might result in roasted chicken.

For now, then, I simply turn to the ladies at the Fair Foods stand, who supply me with superior local, genuinely free-range, wonderfully fresh eggs. These are the kinds of eggs that are so fresh, they come with wisps of hay attached and are impossible to peel once hard-boiled: Harold McGee explains that the albumen of fresh eggs has a relatively low pH which makes it more attracted to the shell membrane than to itself. Old eggs are better boilers. My yearning for fresh local eggs thus satisfied, the remaining loss is that faded-photograph connection to my sweetheart’s childhood, a way of floating back to the colours and flavours of the past.

But we have a thready way back to that too, a stitch that anchors us, much like that cloudy twist of albumen attached to all egg-yolks - the elastic chalazae that forms a safety harness for the yolk, allowing it to rotate but stay in the middle of its chalky house. Our version of that gentle life-line is a recipe, beloved by B, bequeathed to us by her mother, and originally shared with them by one of those temporary, passing-through members of their household. The recipe is for Tea Eggs and its author is a Mrs Sze. Mrs Sze and the other 6 members of her family were sponsored by B’s family so that they could escape Vietnam and the war. A Chinese family, who had gone to work in Saigon, they had translated themselves into an unfamiliar country already, and then, lifted out of the horror of the Tet Offensive, they found themselves living in Amherst, Massachusetts with a family of 6: the seven Szes adrift with six New Englanders. From all accounts, it was a relatively happy blend of both children and adults and the tales centre on culinary exchange. The favourite, for B, is the Tea Egg. She talks of it dreamily, and with the simplicity of a small child. This past Christmas, her mother gave us a handwritten book of family recipes. Two pages were dedicated to Mrs Sze’s recipes, written out complete with the Chinese ideograph for “five spice” and the note that “accent” (that would be the dastardly MSG) was optional.

Tea Eggs are first hard-boiled, cooled and then you gently crack the shells all over with the back of a spoon before simmering and soaking them in water seasoned with tea, spices and soy sauce. The aromatic bath seeps into the cracks, flavouring the egg and marbling it with brown lines that follow the shell cracks. The recipe calls for generic “strong loose-leaf black tea,” but when B stuck her nose into the Yorkshire Gold tea we consume most often, she shook her head. This was not the scent she remembered. Poking her beak into all our teas, memory was finally triggered by the enveloping aroma of Lapsang Souchong, and in went two tablespoons of those fermented black leaves. The eggs are beautiful in all their stages: the first, freckled underwater boil; the deep matte mahogany that their shells turn, with scraps of tea leaf attached; then there’s the wonder of the peeled egg and the remnant peel – the way that the marbled insides and outsides map onto each other.

We ask a lot of eggs. We’ve held candles to them to divine their secrets – startling the scene beneath the shell, we’ve indentured them to our symbologies, and painted them and buried them. There is much marvel in an egg, much joy in apprenticing ourselves to the art of the omelette, or the conjuring of the lightest scrambled eggs. Most approaches, it seems to me, recognize that the egg is its own entity and works best if we don’t touch it much. An omelet is tossed, scrambled egg curds should be barely disturbed (perhaps even hover over heat in a double boiler, or, some maintain, be steamed with a cappuccino machine), and eggs simply lodged in a glass jar with a truffle will assume the aromatics of that highly-favoured fungus. Even if carried on the winds of war, a tea egg is a good reminder of many things: of the “not sized, cracked” eggs that a large Massachusetts family bought straight from the farm in thrifty bulk, of the overlap of differing worlds, of the virtues of infusion, and of the fragrances that can be transported from one life to another when cracks appear.

SYLLABUS: MRS SZE'S TEA EGGS

Makes 8-20 eggs

8- 20 eggs (use the same 'broth' quantities)
1/2 cup soy sauce
4 tblsp salt
4 star anise, broken up
1 tsp five spice powder
2 tblsp dark loose tea leaves
a few peppercorns
one strip orange or tangerine peel
(I've adapted Mrs Sze's recipe slightly to make a stronger-tasting egg)

1. Hard boil the eggs by covering with water and bringing to a boil. Cover, turn off the heat, and let sit for 15 minutes. Cool completely in cold water. This loosens the shell.
2. Using the back of a spoon, gently crack the egg shells. Do not peel!
3. Put the eggs in water just to cover and add the broth ingredients. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 1 hr.
4. Remove from the heat and place eggs and tea broth in a covered container. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
5. Eggs are best stored in the fridge, with shells on.

To eat, shell the egg and serve as a snack, or salad or soup ingredient.

Celebration Cakes

2006-08-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

Today I did not make a cake. This is unusual anyway, but particularly strange because it is B's birthday. My pans are still in their cupboard, my icing nozzles stashed in the basement. Why this non-occurrence of cake? Because today the August sun, that sexy beast, is in full gold-chained swagger. The temperature is "96 degrees feels like 105 degrees" and as our friend Sharon maintains, if it feels like 105 degrees, it is. So we have sealed ourselves up in the room with the good air conditioner and plenty of iced tea - and my little Leo goes cakeless. At least our iced tea is freshly brewed from green elderflower loose leaf tea, and we are sipping it from B's birthday present: hand-blown Swedish tumblers that look like they have been extracted from a prehistoric glacier.

I know better - also a rare state of being - than to attempt high-summer cake-construction, due to a recent catastrophe. Our friend Imke had a Significant Birthday on June 8th and she had long been promised a birthday cake. Imke had reviewed several of my previous cakes and (lovingly) declared them to be far, far too high femme for her tastes. Her cake, she decreed, spinning off into parody of her German origins, was to be "Sqvare!" Her beloved, Heidi - a five-star dessert-maker - conspired with me to make her a sour-cream chocolate cake, sandwiched together with Italian buttercream laced with brandy, the entire affair coated in dark chocolate ganache. It turns out that Heidi and I in a kitchen together have entirely too much fun. Not having the right sized square tins, we proposed the genius solution of making the cake in round tins and "trimming" it. One on each side of the cake, we went at it with our knives, like topiarists on amphetamines. A bit here, a sliver there, some leveling . . . when we laid down our tools and stood back, we were surprised to see - well - not much cake. Tiny, square-ish, lopped and brown it sat in front of us. Slightly trembly, it seemed.

Undaunted, Heidi whipped up the Italian buttercream - spinning sugar syrup into the egg whites and adding butter until it became glossy and glamorous. We split and sandwiched the cake with it, and it started to look less like a surgically modified house pet and more like a liquorice allsort. We moved on to the ganache. Poured from a height, it slid over the cake-cube's uncertain shoulders, lending it a satiny sophistication we hadn't thought possible. But classiness is never a stable commodity . . . Just you wait, 'enry 'iggins, just you wait. . . .

You see, it was hot. It was June 8th and it was already hot. Heidi and I were faced with a dilemma - to refrigerate or not to refrigerate? Our question was a fair one: when it is hot and you have a melty cake, it would seem that you should pop it into the fridge. But when chocolate is involved, your hand is stayed: chocolate popped into a fridge "blooms," and not in the good way. Bloomed chocolate is dull and ashen. All that luverly glossiness would be lost. It was time to go to dinner, so we opted to leave the cake out and cross our fingers. When we returned, we would decorate it and have cake at home. The dinner - at a delightful neighbourhood bistro called Pif - was a joy. We toasted with champagne in honour of the particular Numeric Significance of the birthday, ate snails and dorade and foie gras and steak frites, and then there was some more champagne. And maybe a little wine too. We tumbled out of there and broke out sparklers to light our way home.

Replete with French food and plenty of champers, Heidi and I returned to the kitchen. We were both decked out in skirts and high heels and there was some teetering. Not just us, it turns out. In our absence, the little brown cake had been doing some sliding of its own. Its elegant chocolate cloak was now revealing just a hint of shoulder and that Italian hussy of a buttercream was slinking around corners too. I don't remember addressing this problem. I do remember Heidi and I, one of us with a fish slice, one with a spatula, sliding our implements under its bottom and raising the entire structure aloft, off its cooling rack and onto a presentation plate. The cake responded by stepping out of its outer garment altogether, retaining only a cap of ganache. Heidi and I got mean. We fish-sliced up the discarded ganache and started slapping it back on the sides of the cake. Heidi had brought a jar of dragees and we assured each other that these metallic marbles were just the ticket to disguise the damage. Sadly, on her way to administer this remedy, and in the very act of opening the dragees, Heidi tripped on her lovely shoe and fell forward half way across the kitchen. The dragees flew out in an impressive spray and landed all over the left side of the cake and the lava folds of its discarded ganache. Hilarity ensued. Eventually I drew out my icing bag, slid in the nozzle and filled it with icing. Imke was delivered a not-at-all sqvare pixilated cake that looked like it had suffered a stroke, but proudly announced HAPPY BIRTHDAY IMKE! in powder blue script. We still find the occasional dragee stuck between the floorboards, or in the sash window frame, winking up at us.

In some ways, I feel that Imke got what she called for. The cake that had precipitated her request for "sqvare!" - the hyper girly cake that Imke did not want - was not only frilly but almost disturbingly pristine. If Imke's cake was a colossal (but, I must say in Heidi's and my defense, aggressively delicious) failure, that other cake was probably the most immaculate gateau I have yet made.

It was an anniversary cake for friends celebrating 20 years of togetherness, and they had told us a tale of falling in love and buying pink heart-shaped balloons and wandering through a public park with them tied to their wrists. I decided to commemorate this act of adoration, and make them two pink hearts. I knew that the potential sickliness of this design -pinkness AND hearts - demanded some mitigation, and I thought that one way of doing this would be to link the hearts with a ribbon - à la the classic tattoo image. I went to Fante's, a huge and venerable kitchen store down the street in Philly's Italian Market, and bought two big heart shaped pans for not much money at all. I polled my friends about the cake flavour. They opted for poppy seed and rose, and I made them the white cake recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's monumental Cake Bible, with the addition of slate-grey poppy seeds and dusty crimson rose petals. I cut a curve out of one of the hearts so that it snuggled up to the other, pampered them with the Italian buttercream and started swathing them in fondant icing that I'd massaged into being two different shades of pink and rolled out with a rolling pin as if it were pastry. It was clear that, tattoo design notwithstanding, I was headed fast down the petunia path of dalliance with high frouf, and was moving beyond mere "femme" to the giddy heights of full-blown, over the top foppery. By the time I found myself moulding roses out of scraps of fondant, ripping the edges of the petals for the lacy look, I knew there was no hope. Besotted with my own creation, I spent the day circling it, primping like a flushed chamber-maid.

I was not entirely new to this business of decorating cakes. When I was growing up, my mother took herself to an evening class to learn cake decoration and promptly became a professional. She made wedding cakes and christening cakes; formal, exquisite, royal-iced counter-signatures to the social ritual. At an early age I quietly decided that her cakes were far more beautiful than the marriages could ever be. None of her fussy brides or sullen grooms ever seemed worthy to me. The cakes took months and months to make. Because decoration with royal icing takes so long, they had to be fruitcakes. Fruitcake is horrifying, I know, to the American palate, but it is beloved in the land of my nativity and fruitcakes are preserved with so much alcohol and dried fruit that they last, drunken but stoic, forever.

Mother sealed the cakes with a layer of marzipan, then spent months covering them with layer upon layer of royal icing. Each thin coat had to be leveled off with a straight blade until there were no air bubbles and then left to dry for at least a day. Time got trapped between those friable layers. And it didn't stop with the wedding. The christening cakes were made from the small top tier of the wedding cakes. The bride saved that tiny tier, insulated by the marzipan and icing, until the baby was immanent and then returned it on swollen ankles to my mother. Mother would chisel off the disturbing dental crowns of now-stained confectionary and re-ice the diminutive form, making it sparkle again with sugar deposit and topping it with hand-made sugar cradles that actually rocked. I was her helper in all this, her little Igor. She set up a drop-leaved table in the middle of the narrow kitchen, and I inched around it, couriering wax paper sheets of brittle latticework from counter to table, building roses petal by petal, or hollowing out iced bells, so that mother could pipe clappers inside them, finished with a dab of gold paint. Together we journeyed to ancient, lace-curtained shops wedged into otherwise residential areas. They were lined with peg-board and seemed strangely empty, but the ladies who ran them produced felt pens with edible ink and buckets of powdered egg white and nozzles that piped leaves.

When family birthdays came around, we let loose a little. No royal icing for those, but instead buttercream. The Australian-style fondant icing hadn't quite caught on in England yet. Now it is ubiquitous, and I once spent an amazed hour on the internet discovering that in England you can get anything made in sponge cake and draped in fondant, and I do mean anything. I have noted before the fondness of the Great British Public for naturism, and it turns out that when it comes to naturism, you can have your cake and eat it too. Our family celebrations were mostly spent clothed (the photograph of us in matching Stuart tartan Christmas outfits is happily not digitized), but a representational cake was considered de rigeur at any celebration. We made fairy castles with upturned ice-cream cones for turrets, and football fields covered in green desiccated coconut and clocks with chocolate buttons and iced white numbers (a fundamentally pedagogical design made for the youngest birthdayers). The cricket bat and ball was a screaming success with my brother, so the next year mother made him a rugby ball, complete with seams and lacing. Led downstairs to it on the birthday morn, he made appropriate sounds, but by the end of the day he had to confess that he had no idea what the vaguely oval brown lump was meant to represent. Another time we made him a magnificent elephant, staying up into the wee hours to finish it. We perfected the trunk and carved white chocolate tusks, then we dropped the entire animal on the floor.

I have carried the cake sculpture - rather than the royal icing - set of skills through my various stages of life. I made a Mini Cooper for friends in college, a three dimensional mouse for a lovely child named Irené� and - perhaps my favourite - a sea-monkey for a graduate school room-mate. There is little call these days for elaborate royal-iced celebration cakes like my mother used to make: people want sponge cakes and easy-off icing. It may well return, in slightly different form, as many fashions do, and maybe our rituals will have changed by then too.

SYLLABUS: CHOCOLATE SOUR-CREAM CAKE

(Bundt if casual, but perfectly serviceable in other forms)

NOTE: Since "Anonymous" from the blissfully cooler north has requested it, I humbly submit the recipe for the Chocolate Sour Cream Cake. This recipe became a favourite when B's college roommate Holly commissioned me to make her wedding cake last summer. Her requirement was that it be the richest chocolate cake possible. Because it had to be transported to Massachusetts, navigate the demands of a very rural ceremony, and look presentable, she knew it couldn't be a flourless chocolate recipe, but she wanted a cake that came as close as possible. I started experimenting, making chocolate cakes, packing up big slices in Tupperware containers, and sticking them in two-day mail to Holly and her partner Debby. They taste tested many cakes and finally this recipe, adapted from one published in Cook's Illustrated, did the trick. I have made it many times since. It IS the chocolatiest ever, although it is best and moistest of all when it is cooked as a bundt cake. If you cook it as a bundt, try serving it (unfrosted) with whipped cream and raspberries. The wedding cake had to be big - a vast concoction 4 times the size of the original recipe (I had to do some very clever maths - you can't just multiply the recipe by four, because the larger the pan size, the less percentage of raising agent is required. Baking powder weakens the structure of the cake and had I just quadrupled everything, the large surface area would be under-supported. If anyone wants I am happy to send on the proportions for the giant version). What follows is the recipe for the regular (but generous) sized cake, with the buttercream and ganache recipes attached too for anyone who wants to go fancy with this and is not fazed by my tale. Remember, you put the buttercream between the cake layers (you can slice your original two in half to make four skinny layers), like sandwich filling, and pour the ganache over top of the whole concoction. Don't frost the top or sides of the cake with buttercream!

CHOCOLATE SOUR CREAM CAKE

2 1/4 oz natural cocoa (not Dutch processed)
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped VERY fine - or grated - don't cut corners here
1 tsp instant espresso powder
3/4 cup boiling water
1 cup sour cream, room temp
8 3/4 oz (1 3/4 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
12 tablespoons (6 oz) unsalted butter, room temp
14 oz (2 cups) packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
5 large eggs, room temp
confectioners sugar for dusting

1. Line your pan. Melt some butter (not the amounts in your recipe -- extra). Stir it together with some cocoa (again, extra) until a paste forms. Using a pastry brush coat interior of standard 12-cup Bundt pan. Alternatively, use a cake release spray such as Baker's Joy. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 350F.
2. Now you're working with recipe amounts. Combine cocoa, chocolate and espresso powder in medium heatproof bowl. Pour boiling water over and whisk vigorously until smooth. Cool to room temp, then whisk in sour cream. Whisk flour, salt and baking soda in a second bowl to combine.
3. In mixer fitted with flat beater, beat butter, sugar and vanilla on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to medium and add eggs one at a time, mixing about 30 seconds after each addition and scraping down bowl with rubber spatula after first 2 additions. Reduce to medium-low speed (batter may appear separated); add about one third of the flour mixture and half of chocolate/sour cream mixture and mix until just incorporated, about 20 seconds. Scrape bowl and repeat using half of remaining flour and all of remaining chocolate mixture. Add remaining flour mixture and beat until just incorporated, about 10 seconds. Scrape bowl and mix on medium-low until batter is thoroughly combined, about 30 seconds. Pour batter into prepared Bundt pan, being careful not to pour batter on sides of pan. Bake until wooden skewer inserted into middle comes out with few crumbs attached, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then invert cake onto parchment-lined wire rack, cool to room temp, about 3 hours. Dust with confectioner's sugar.

ITALIAN BUTTERCREAM

Makes 4 1/2 cups

250g/ 8.75oz/ 1 1/4 cups sugar
5 large egg whites
Pinch of cream of tartar
1 pound unsalted butter, chilled
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Brandy to taste

1. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring sugar and 2/3 cup water to a boil. Continue boiling until syrup reaches 238F on a candy thermometer (soft-ball stage).
2. Meanwhile, place egg whites in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, and beat on low speed until foamy. Add cream of tartar, and beat on medium-high speed until stiff but not dry; do not overbeat.
3. With mixer running, add syrup to whites in a stream, beating on high speed until no longer steaming, about 3 minutes. Add butter bit by bit, beating until spreadable, 3 to 5 minutes; beat in vanilla and brandy. If icing curdles, keep beating until smooth.

CHOCOLATE GANACHE

Makes 2 full cups - enough to glaze a 9" cake

9oz/255g bittersweet chocolate
8oz/232g/1 cup heavy/double cream
1 tblsp Cognac

1. Process chocolate in food processor until very fine. Put it in a small heavy saucepan.
2. Heat cream to boiling point and pour 3/4 of it over the chocolate. Cover for 5 minutes to allow it to melt. Gently stir together trying not to create air bubbles. Pass through fine strainer and add Cognac. Cool till just tepid.
3. Check consistency: when tepid, the glaze should mound a bit before disappearing. If it is too thick, or seems curdled, add more of the warm cream little by little. If too thin, add some melted chocolate. When right, use at once or store and reheat.
4. Pour over cooled cake allowing excess to flow down the sides. If you want a double coat, refrigerate the cake after the first later, for about 20 mins or until firm. Apply a second coat -- but don't refrigerate after second coat or you'll lose that glossiness.

A Pot of Basil

2006-07-28T00:13:00.000-04:00

When someone gives you a big bag of basil, you are honour bound to make pesto. And even if honour has no sway over you (I confess that I am, more often than not, cloth-eared to its calls), the fragrance of the plucked basil will imperiously demand it anyway. The task is weighty, because if you are going to make pesto, you need to make it right. You are not imitating the thick sludge that you can buy in overpriced food stores. No. You are aiming for an ambrosial sauce – “oh for a beaker of the warm south!” No half measures, no cutting of corners. I tried that once and I will here share the story of my foolishness in the hope that it might hop up and down, flapping its wings, warning you from venturing down that path.

When I was living in Ohio I made a friend named George. Ohio provided one of the many small-college settings for scenes of my Uncertain Future, and it required an adventurous spirit if one wished to winkle out gustatory goodness. Food shopping had to be done at huge supermarkets that smelled of stale bleach (not a contradiction, it turns out) and were called Giant Eagles. They scared me. My food friendship with George was formed over the formica counter of that existence, and someone should have given us A for effort. Left alone for a week or so – our partners had both and separately taken off for forgotten reasons – the friendship blossomed into a full-blown folie à deux. Strapped into his bronze Toyota, a car that felt as flimsy as a tin pie pan, we hurtled across the wheat fields in search of edibles. George had, I should mention, only learned to drive a few weeks before, which added considerable novelty and thrill to the ride. And we found all sorts of good things.

We found ice-cream shacks sporting their original 1950s décor. In the summer evenings, couples drove up in their prized vintage open-top cars that had sat in garages all winter long, meticulously restored and waiting for these outings. We found Polish sausages – thick, juicy sausages that could slay your average hot-dog in a trice. There was the Middle Eastern restaurant that introduced me to fattoush, and spurred the first of my many pashes on bread salads. And one town over, a town that closed its last steel mill while we were there, I first tasted the delights of Puerto Rican cooking. Rushing to corner stores before they closed at 6pm, we’d get early dinners of salty, meaty, fried deliciousness that made me curl my toes with pleasure.

But our biggest coup, without a doubt, was the discovery of the dented can emporium. As I write it now, I can hardly believe that this place existed. Maybe it was a fourth dimension, a worm hole into one of Ohio’s other galaxies. It was in a low-rise, stand-alone windowless building that looked more like a meth lab than a grocery store. A battered yellow plastic sign waved you into the parking lot and you entered round back. The first time we went there the electricity was out and we had to wander through the dim maze of aisles led only by our fierce taste for bounty. There were dented cans aplenty. Rows and pyramids and stacks of them. At some point it dawned on us both that these creased and dimpled cans were pretty much exclusively cans of shellfish and “shellfish product.” This realisation merely added salt to our stew and we cackled over our good fortune, cavorting midst the botulism. We finally arrived at the treasure we knew we’d find: shelves of imported Italian tomatoes canned with basil leaves. Nothing of this caliber could be found at the loathed Big Bird supermarkets. We picked out the least compromised tins and piled them into our cart. As the odd gentleman who seemed to own the place was doing the sums with a stubby pencil on a notepad illuminated by a flashlight, he offered us a frequent buyer card and a raffle ticket for a Grand Prize Food Basket. George insisted on being led to inspect the Grand Prize Food Basket, and pointing the flashlight down through the many mummifying layers of budget plastic wrap, we observed that it was comprised solely of soda crackers and something called “Smooth Move” tea: a senna leaf preparation for the relief of occasional constipation. Now positively maniac with the glory of the trove, George and I agreed that our odyssey to the dented can store was, in fact, the ultimate definition of a Smooth Move.

But the scrape of note – the scrape that must stand as a warning to all prospective pesto-makers – came about when George turned up on my doorstep with a bushel of basil. I had never seen a bushel of basil before. Nor, it turned out, had George when he called to order “some basil” from a local farmer. A bushel had sounded a suitable unit – rustic, alliterative - so he’d agreed to it. Let me explain, young grasshopper, so that when you are offered a bushel of basil, you will know what awaits you. A US bushel is a little more than 9 US gallons. An Imperial bushel is 8 Imperial gallons. I am not clear on whether our bushel was of the Imperial or US orientation, but I do know that when I answered my doorbell that day, I could see not much of George, just a lot of basil. “Pesto!” he declared from behind the portable forest.

Soon my kitchen was like the eye of a basil storm. Neither George nor I was at the stage of life in which we owned the right equipment for anything. We also didn’t have key reference texts, or an internet connection. What we had was bags of get up and go. Before long, my cranky blender was chewing up pine nuts and basil leaves, and bowls of hacked up foliage were littering the kitchen. One bushel of herb is a lot for one yard-sale blender, and we resorted to operating the machine with its lid off, jabbing a wooden spoon into the fray whenever we felt brave. The riskiness of this endeavour took all of our concentration, which may be why we didn’t notice that our many bowls of churned basil were turning black and malevolent – entirely ruined.

Basil is a noble herb. Many different cultures revere it. Some varieties are known as “Holy Basil” and are planted outside Hindu temples. The ancient Greeks believed it was the king’s plant, that only the king himself should harvest the leaves, and only with the use of a golden sickle. Perhaps this mandate was made in forethought of blender-armed philistines such as George and me. Golden moon-blades may be fine, but basil leaves and blades are otherwise not a happy combination. Not even the blades of the swish food processor I now own. Cutting the leaves cauterizes the veins, inhibiting the release of their flavour and any machine will produce some heat, which oxidizes and dulls the aromatic oils. The name “pesto” comes from the Italian word pestare meaning to pound or bruise, and we should learn the lesson of the etymology. The bold, sweet fragrance of basil is best released through the poundings of a mortar and pestle.

The first pesto I made with a mortar and pestle, following the recipe for Genovese pesto in Clifford A. Wright’s remarkable tome, A Mediterranean Feast, was entirely different from any pesto I had made before - harsh tasting mashes, stiff with too much cheese and nuts, and burning with too much garlic. Following Wright’s measured, philosophical recipe made me understand pesto as a sauce; liquid and leafy. The bruised basil is suspended in oil, happy to give up its essence. The pounding it requires is muscular, but the rest of the preparation is calm, and begins with a cleansing and drying that feels like a ritual. The basil must be washed and then thoroughly dried - laid out on kitchen towels until not even the suspicion of damp adheres to them. The olive oil must be the best, cold-press virgin oil and the freshest you can find. Do not be tempted to supplement the seemingly scant quantities of garlic, pine nuts and cheese in his recipe - these should be mild companion flavours in the sauce. When the ingredients join together in your large mortar, use the pestle to push them closer together, pressing against the sides of the bowl. A firm, gentle push and a slight turning motion. Once they begin to blend into a paste, then you start to pound. The result is one of those benevolent dwellers of the fridge - a jar of lively green sauce that can be stored for many months so long as you replenish the film of olive oil on its surface.

Now we grow basil in our small city garden. Ours is a container garden and we could not help ourselves: we felt compelled to re-create the grisly remnant in Boccacio’s tale of love and decapitation. The Decameron tale recounts how three brothers, puffed with wealth and cruelty, kill and bury their sister’s lover, Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s corpse appears to the bereft Lisabetta in a dream, giving her careful directions to his grave. In Keats' retelling of the story, Lorenzo describes the spot as crowded by fruit and vegetables – more like a salad bowl than a tomb. Lisabetta (Keats calls her ‘Isabella’) digs up his head, wraps it in some fancy cloth and replants it in a posh flowerpot. She then, according to Boccacio, “planted several sprigs of the finest Salernitan basil, and never watered them except with essence of roses or orange-blossom, or with her own teardrops.” The rotten brothers steal even the pampered pot of basil and Lisabetta dies from grief redoubled. No pesto for her. In Keats' poem, he carefully notes that the brothers took their revenge on Lorenzo with “duller steel than the Persèan sword.” So perhaps in memory of the great basil massacre with George and the Persèan blender, perhaps because there can surely be nothing better than a mouldering head to produce a feisty crop of sweet basil (Salome, an epicurean lass, also hid John the Baptist's head in basil), we knew what we had to do when we saw a pile of ceramic dolls' heads and limbs for sale at a flea market. Before planting our basil this year, we tucked a blandly smiling, apple cheeked head deep into the pot, and lo! It did the trick – our basil plants have never been lusher. The head came with two slender ceramic hands – the seller was quite formidable about only selling complete sets, as if she feared seamstresses who might make differently abled dollies – so I arranged them sticking out of the top of the soil, to give pause to any golden-sickeled or fraternally vengeful thieves.

SYLLABUS:PESTO ALLA GENOVESE
adapted from Clifford A. Wright

1 bunch fresh basil (80 medium sized leaves), washed and thoroughly dried. I actually weighed 80 leaves, since I was making more than one batch; by my mathematics, 80 medium sized basil leaves weigh about 1.5 ounces.
2 garlic cloves, peeled
Pinch of salt
2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted
3 tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
3 tablespoons freshly grated pecorino cheese
1 cup extra virgin olive oil.

Pound the basil, garlic, salt and pine nuts together in the mortar until they are a paste. Slowly add the cheeses, about a tablespoon at a time, keeping on pounding. Once you have a paste, scrape it into a bowl and begin slowly adding the olive oil, stirring constantly. It will seem to you that you have too much olive oil – it will not resemble the thick stuff you buy in the supermarkets at all. But that olive oil carries the flavor and also preserves it. Wright says you can keep this pesto in the fridge up to six months, as long as you keep topping up the oil.

Fun with Squash Blossoms

2006-07-21T18:34:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you do things in the kitchen that make you wonder at yourself. In my college days I remember being very taken by a Francis Bacon painting of meat and his remarks in the gallery catalogue about how contemplating the food on our plate was to study the magnificent violence of life. I spent college in the company of vegans, and since I had joined the cause of cruelty-free food but found I could not repress my omnivorous tendencies, I was quite persuaded by Bacon's idea that instead of avoiding brutality we could confront it. Since this vision included recommencing eating ham and eggs, I was doubly persuaded. Several joyful non-vegan years later, I came across Bacon's description of stealing images from other artists - "rather like people who eat from other people's plates" - and I knew I'd hopped onto the right lunch-truck. An artist with shades of that famed sausage-stealer Helen Keller is the artist for me.

And so it was that yesterday I found myself in my kitchen with a pair of tweezers in one hand, a delicate squash blossom in the other. As I peeled open the tendrils of the blossom's petals, which were veined and entwined like the fingers of a neurotic, I thought about how fleshly and even ominous flowers can be, and remembered that what Francis Bacon did for sides of beef, Georgia O'Keefe did for posies. I reached my tweezers inside and grabbed the fleshy pistil growing out of the base of the blossom. My steel angles pinching the yellow-bobbled organ, I twisted and pulled - it took a surprising amount of force. Soon I had eleven de-sexed blossoms, their remnant parts piled beside them. Eleven: the sorry inverse of a baker's dozen. I thought I had asked for a "dozen" but some distortion somewhere - of brain or tongue - resulted in eleven. Maybe the blossoms themselves, freakish orange carapaces, conspired against me; in any case, my evening of inverted, distorted and accidentally rude cooking had begun.

Having severed the flowers from their pistils, I proceeded to intrude on their now-roomier chambers with a prosthetic in the form of a piping nozzle. I had mixed together a cup of fresh chevre, some minced summer garlic, a handful of fresh herbs - tarragon, thyme and chives - and an eggcup-full of red spring onion, cut into minute dice. A little salt, a little black pepper, then I loaded it into an icing bag. Squash blossoms are narrow, with long cavities, and no spoon I owned would have done the job without splitting them open. Besides, I find piping so agreeable. The extruded chevre filled up the blossoms, I twisted the flowers shut again and lodged them in the fridge so that they could chill and firm until our guests arrived.

B, who had watched the squash blossom massacre of the innocents with a jaundiced eye, was set to work shucking corn. She is from the farm country of Western Massachusetts, and is a snob about sweet corn. She will only eat it in season, and only on the day that it is picked. She was excited about this batch from our farm share, and was chattering away about kernel size and color as she shucked, musing on the differences between varieties with curious womanly names like "Silver Queen" and "Calico Belle" . . . then I heard her laugh. I turned, and she held up a pale ear, its silk still hanging from the kernels. There, attached to the base of the big ear, was another, miniature ear, valiant in its somewhat obscene deformity. "There's your number twelve," B said, smiling puckishly.

Another puckish smile soon arrived. Max is four and three quarters, and possessed of a devilish sideways grin - there's something magically Danny Kaye about him. He is also fond of concocting in the kitchen, and tonight he wanted to devise his own cocktail, a pink one with maraschino cherries. Sadly, I had no cherries in the house, but together we rummaged around in the sideboard and unearthed some grenadine and an unopened packet of colourful cocktail sticks. While the rest of us made ourselves a delightfully dizzy drink of half sake, half plum wine and a lot of ice, Max and one of his mommies, Patty, set about perking up his lemonade to his taste. Some grenadine, some ice, a little mint that Max harvested from the garden, and one of the plastic cocktail sticks. "Look Maxie," I heard Patty say. "It's a frog." The remainder of the adult crew started carrying things out to the garden. "It's not a frog," I heard Max's little voice assert behind me, "They're humans."

I stuck my head back into the kitchen to find that the unplanned theme of the evening was continuing apace. Patty held up the green cocktail stick, observing, "Yes, copulating humans." I dropped my dish of tomatoes and seized the exhibit. Close inspection revealed that it was indeed a detailed and garishly green plastic representation of a gentleman and a lady having some acrobatic fun together. Patty and I reviewed the box and it turned out to contain many - impressively varied - versions of the same. B and I tried to remember who had given us these, and how many years ago, and whether we had paid sufficient attention to them and/or had an appropriately gratifying response at the time? Had they always looked like palm trees and giraffes to us? Did some forgotten wag of a friend leave and never return, sad that their gift had fallen flat?

Shoving the cocktail sticks back into the depths of the sideboard, where I'm sure they will bide their time until I have forgotten about them again, I began frying our blossoms. First they bathed luxuriantly in egg and milk, then I dredged them in some seasoned masa harina, which several recipes had assured me would give a crisper blossom than flour or cornmeal. A quick, rolling dip into the hot oil, a short rest on paper towels, and the eleven little delicacies were borne to the table. These were the first squash blossoms I had made, and they browned and crisped most compliantly. Accompanied by the corn, Patty’s homemade pickles and a salad made of her tomatoes and basil, it was a light and charming meal, positively G rated in its bucolic pleasures. Biting the blossom open revealed a flutter of yellow and the creamy white cheese, dashed through with the purple and green hints of onion and herbs. There was a bit of a Helen Kellerish tussle over the uneven numbers - eleven does not divide nicely - but the corn was abundant and filled all the corners, so no one went hungry. We finished the meal with a strawberry and rhubarb pie, while Max treated us to a vigorous rendition of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" on the piano, producing curious and delightful chords that not even Danny Kaye could have extracted from the instrument, his little legs a-swinging.

Leeks, Cucumbers and Folly

2006-07-18T21:21:00.000-04:00

Today is the morning after. Last night the temperature here in Philadelphia stopped just shy of 100 degrees. It was the hottest evening this summer has seen, and what did I do? I spent it hovering over a hotter yet grill. I cannot say why. I am, perhaps, a little touched. Or if I wasn’t before last night, I am now, since crucial bits of me got sauteed. I recently read an account from the 1930s of a traveller on a transatlantic cruise who died of heat stroke and had to be buried at sea. It struck me that there were some enticing symmetries to the extremities of that ending: death from sunning on a deck chair, resolutely wearing one’s blazer, followed by a headlong slip into a deep cool everlasting blue.

But last night large amounts of New Jersey stood between me and the sea, so there was no counter-balance to my headfirst encounter with heat and more heat. I embraced it. Became one with my environment. Dripped sweat into my grill. I was driven to it by gluttony, of course. A while ago I had been served, at a local tapas restaurant, grilled green onions with romesco sauce and I was entirely smitten by the dish. I loved the almondy heft of the sauce and its substantial, but not occluding flavours of fresh garlic and smoky chile. It was a sauce that had a smoldering, laid back attitude and I was hooked. Giddy to try it again, I looked up recipes. My friend Rosi fed my crush with tales of eating this Catalan dish in Spain, the diners dangling the romesco-slathered green onions high above their upturned mouths, devouring their sweet char vertically.

I turned to Rosi to help me translate and track down the “pimenton” called for by my most trustworthy recipe. I had thought that if I couldn’t find pimenton, I could use some of the Hungarian smoked paprika that I already had in my pantry. A trail around our local spice store, however, led us to something called “Spanish Paprika” and Rosi looked hopeful: we wafted its sweet smokiness under our noses and knew at once that it was the right ingredient. I also bought a bag of suave-looking dried Ancho chiles – the other big player in the sauce.

Back home I set the Anchos soaking in a bowl of water to rehydrate them. I also needed two slices of bread so I fished out the dried up ends of one of my sourdough loaves from the depths of my bread bag. I was sure that these, too, could be un-desiccated. Such salvage in the kitchen makes me feel satisfied with my lot. Smug even. These slices went into a skillet with some olive oil and were soon crispily revived.

At this point I started hopping between two recipes. The trustworthy one that had bothered to name and differentiate its chile peppers called only for canned tomatoes. But another recipe, more slapdash on the chile front, called for canned plum tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes too. Another chance for culinary rescue! Just the other day I had decided to purge the freezer part of my fridge-freezer of everything that wasn’t an ice-cube tray or gin, vodka or limoncello. Since the (oh happy day) installation of a big freezer in the basement, the idea had been to banish everything else to Down Below. I had never quite got round to effecting this lofty aim, but the other day the mood fell on me. Out came the tubs of – I don’t deny it - goose fat and duck fat and chicken fat. Out came the stock bag with asparagus ends and vegetable trimmings. The package of emergency bacon. Dragging all of this flotsam and jetsam out of the mini-freezer revealed that we still had a couple of containers of last year’s semi-dried tomatoes. A while back my friends Jen and Larry had introduced me to the marvelous business of slow, semi-drying tomatoes in a low oven. Brushed with some olive oil and salt and pepper and cooked for hours, they take on a full, bright caramelised flavour – as Jen said, “like tomato jam.” They are now a much-cherished part of our diet not only because of their innate goodness, but because my beloved has always had a beef with the sun-dried tomatoes you get in jars. She thinks they’re loud and pushy and aggressively oily. These half-dried tomatoes – or sun-blush, as I’ve seen them called – are less brash and nicer to be with.

So the remainder of our store of tomatoes would fill out our romesco – completing the arc from last summer to this. The bread, the tomatoes, the chiles and the toasted almonds went into the food processor, were mixed to a paste and thinned to taste. The Anchos had softened obligingly, and I had to de-seed and chop them. One of them, the cad, spewed rivulets of brown seedy liquor all over my counter, dripping down into the cabinets and leaving its traces on my baking pans, but otherwise the sauce came together with ease.

The rest of our menu we had fetched from the market. Chicken thighs and . . . leeks. I’m not sure why I came back with leeks, not green onions. But I love a leek, I loved the idea of a young leek, its tender fleshyness swathed with the romesco, and there they were at the Fair Foods stand, looking fresh, svelte and lovely. Once I’d returned home, I realised that lovely though they were, they were perhaps not as slender or young as they might have been. I have never had much truck with those particular attributes – being something of a ripe voluptuary myself - but now I was requiring slim youth of my leeks? My fixation on cooking this dish had ignored the fact that leeks in early July have done some living: if a dog’s year is a human’s decade, what is a leek’s week? Should I turn back? Make something else out of my middle aged veggies? Of course not. True foolishness, I find, generally takes refuge in further foolishness – and so it was last night: I ignored the signs in front of me and instead waded deeper in.

I did, however, administer some reason to the situation. It was fiendishly hot, I was well on my way to being poached in my own kitchen, and my leeks were too old and fat – clearly we all needed some gin. I opened the door to the newly appointed freezer and basked in the twin mists of Freon cool and the satisfaction of having actually cleaned something. There were my gins. Yesss, ginsss. Some Bombay, some Tanqueray Ten and a new cutie-pie: a small squat blue glass bottle of Hendricks. This gin is infused with cucumber and rose-petals and when I first bought it, stashing it unopened in the freezer, I started dreaming about it. I dreamed that there was a gin that was infused with cucumber and rose-petals and I would wake up, amazed at the whimsy of the dream world. Then half way through the morning I would remember that there IS a gin infused with cucumber and rose-petals and it was in my freezer. A week or so ago I stopped hoarding it untasted and opened the bottle. We drank some straight up, convinced we should listen attentively for the whisper of these flavours. Frankly, the whispers eluded us. But tonight was no time for such calibrated living anyway, and I sloshed it into glasses with tonic and a slice of cucumber. As glazed with heat as I was, it was clear that this G&T with its mirage of green and pink was far beyond the ordinary. Somehow the tonic made the delicate hints of rose and cucumber audible. We sipped, happy for a moratorium on the madness.

Though truth be told, the leeks were not half bad. I charred them thoroughly and prodded them to make sure they were soft. Then I piled them into a mound to soften them more as they rested. We peeled back their blackened jackets and dipped the limp white hearts into the sauce. It is true that they took some chewing and more than their jackets got tossed away. But we were playing Marianne Faithfull as we ate, and in her gorgeously ruined, smoky old voice she sang us that Noel Coward song, “Mad About the Boy.” I gnawed on my leek and listened as she let her posh accent fade into a cockney lament: “It seems a little silly for a girl of my age and weight to walk down Piccadilly in a haze of love. It ought to take a good deal more to get a bad girl down . . .” There was a dark hot evening sky way above us, we were canopied by our ominously gnarled ornamental orange tree and the twinkling fairy lights we’d strung between its long thorns, and we agreed that it’s just fine to be an old leek in love, tarted up with a Spanish sauce. “Will it ever cloy,” Marianne rasped, “this odd diversity of misery and joy?” I sucked the romesco from my singed fingertips. I hope not. There is such a thing as necessary folly.

SYLLABUS: FOOL'S ROMESCO

1/4 cup olive oil plus more for frying
2 small slices sourdough bread
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped roughly
1/2 cup almonds, toasted
2 large dried ancho chiles, soaked 6-8 hrs, seeded and roughly chopped
1 cup canned plum tomatoes, liquid reserved
1/2 cup sun-blush or sun-dried tomatoes
1 tbsp pimenton or any smoked paprika
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 lemon, juiced
salt

Heat half an inch of olive oil in sauté pan and fry bread, browning both sides.
In a food processor, grind garlic, almonds and bread. Process until fine.
Add the anchos, tomatoes and pimenton. Puree until smooth.
Add vinegar and lemon juice and puree. While blending, drizzle in the olive oil.
If texture isn’t loose enough, add some of the reserved tomato juice, or additional lemon juice. Season with salt.

Eat with grilled vegetables such as green onions, asparagus or leeks, and grilled fish or chicken.

Summer Pudding

2006-07-11T22:18:00.000-04:00

I love the sniff of a new season around the corner, the stretch of the one you’re in, the memory of the one gone before. Those changes cheer and comfort me, and I love being bustled along by them. Moved into the next season. Even the one I’m not very good at: summer. Summer in steamy Philadelphia, at least. I wilt easily, go too pink, and am constantly asking my beloved if she thinks I have a fever. I ask this with one of my own damp paws raised to my forehead, my eyebrows hoiked high, fishing for sympathy. Exasperated, she tells me for the twelve hundredth time that you can’t perceive your own fever with another of your own identically temperatured body parts. A friend recently informed me that even another person’s hand is a prejudiced gauge and that the best way of checking someone’s temperature is to kiss their forehead. This I like and I make it my next request.

More often than not (all right, always), my ailment turns out to be feebleness in the face of humidity. This does not dent my love of the pleasures peculiar to summer – vampy tomatoes, soft fruits, lemony sorrel and snappy new garlic. Many dishes can only be made in the summer, but there is one that claims centre table to the season, and is indeed named for it: Summer Pudding. Summer Pudding is a delicacy that makes you nod your head in the deep appreciative realisation: this really is summer. You remembered it tasting this way. You had forgotten, but now you remember.

It’s also a recipe that has to remind you why it’s good, because it certainly sounds strange. And it’s deeply, eccentrically English. Describing it to Americans gets me those you-crazy-foreigner-from-the-land-of-bad-food looks. Observe: Summer Pudding is a mix of stewed summer fruits encased in mould of white bread. See? It sounds grotesque. It even looks grotesque as it emerges from its pudding basin, its clammy white jacket blotched with bloody seams.

Here’s how you make it:
First, you must go and live somewhere with a good supply of red and blackcurrants. This is not easy in this country. It took years of me living in various (mostly small college with big retirement home) towns before I landed on my lucky little feet here in Philadelphia, and this is the first place outside of England to show me such fruit. Once again the lovely ladies at the Fair Foods stand at Reading Terminal Market tempted me with their organic, local wares: quarts of not only the elusive red and blackcurrants, but handsome red and black raspberries too, the other essential berry for Summer Pudding. Once you have moved to the right currant supplying location, you need to gather your patience. Currant preparation takes time. The redcurrants come on lime-green stringy stalks, and you pull the small translucent berries off by dragging a fork down the stem. Very satisfying. But then you must check through to see if any tiny green sub-stems remain. Blackcurrants also have to be denuded of both their small stems and their substantial tails that look like crumpled brown-papery crowns. And the only way to do this is by hand – a modest amount of fingernail is useful for such plucking.

The currants picked and tumbled together with the raspberries, the fruit sits, or is “put up” with some sugar overnight, while you make some bread. The bread for this pudding must be just right. Nothing chewy and full of holes, but instead yeasty, very white and soft. So Mother (my sourdough starter) stays in the fridge, and out comes the yeast for what I would call a Crusty Bloomer. Hmm. This does take a lot of explaining. To name a loaf after an undergarment is one thing, to name it after a crusty undergarment is simply pushing everyone’s envelope. But a “bloomer” is a bloomer because it’s voluminous – billowy, rollicking even, vaudeville good. Then it has this wonderful crust that shatters under your knife. And when you make it for Summer Pudding, the crust has to come off, so you make the loaf and then you cut off this lovely crispness and you are forced to daub these trimmings with butter and jam and dispose of them right there and then. Forced, I tell you.

The cook thus furnished, the pudding basin must be lined. The crustless slices of bread get fitted into the bowl, bits trimmed and squished into any gaps. To make the pieces stay in place, poke and press away with your fingers, because pressing is the key – practically the only – cooking process that turns these ingredients into pudding. Your bowl lined, the fruit goes into a pan with some sugar to be very lightly stewed. All you need to do is dissolve the sugar and nudge the fruits into giving up their juices – five minutes tops. Watch as the berries turn from a sugar-frosted mound into a vivacious slew. Once they’ve done this, reserve about a cup of their juice – tuck it away in the fridge, you won’t be using it for a few days yet. Turn half of the berries into the bread-lined pudding basin. This half way pause allows you to implement a trick I learned from Jane Grigson’s Summer Pudding recipe: place an extra slice of bread on top of the first half of the fruit, then continue filling with the rest. This extra, middle slice does not appear in most other recipes, but does an excellent job of securing the architecture of the pudding when you cut into it. Now the pudding needs a cap of bread; cut one to entirely cover the fruit, meeting the edges. Place a saucer on top of it all and a pile of weights on top of the saucer. I use the old weights from my beloved “Viking” scales, which I winkled out of the Age Concern Charity Shop on the Magdalen Roundabout in Oxford, but a big can of tomatoes would do well too. This is the pressing of what I spoke. PRESS YOUR PUDDING! It must be popped into the fridge and pressed and pressed some more. Leave the whole thing in the fridge until a worthy friend happens to come round. A day, two, or maybe three. All of this is Good Pressing Time. You cannot rush a Summer Pudding.

Then when the worthy friend appears at your door (and wonder of wonders, ours arrived with two Tupperwares of “wineberries” she’d picked on the bike trail), slide a palette knife between the basin and the bread jacket, bending the blade down and around to reach under the bottom-soon-to-be-top of the pudding. Invert the basin onto a plate, and merrily conceal any rips by simply cascading the saved juice over the entire affair. It should look mostly scarlet, with just hints of white. A rose geranium leaf set atop, a jug of thick cream (not whipped) beside it, and you can carry the vibrant escutcheon of the season to your garden table. Sliced, this pudding reveals some marvelous, heretical transubstantiations: the bread tastes like cake, the fruit has become winey and the whole thing starts to look like a defiantly pagan, oppositely solsticed version of the traditional holly-topped Christmas Pudding. Blood red, bone white and green, this is the stuff that ballads are made of. And if the worthy friend never turns up, well, it will just have to be you and the pudding. Seasonal eating at its best.

Le Sandwich

2006-07-08T20:11:00.000-04:00

Today, we celebrated Amelie Mauresmo’s winning of the Wimbledon 2006 Ladies’ Championship title . . . with a most excellent sandwich. I suppose I should admit that we would have used the same sandwich to commiserate her loss: I have been planning this sandwich for a while now. When still living in Vermont, I was overtaken one summer afternoon by a French ham sandwich in a small café in Norwich. The taste of this sandwich has stayed with me over the years and I vowed to try and reproduce it. The arresting loveliness of the sandwich was due in part to my realization that it had been ages since I had tasted anything other than smoked ham. This ham was delicate, tender and very, very pink. Lightly cured, instead of chest-beatingly smoked, it nestled in its baguette in a sort of unnervingly pubescent, French kind of way. But it was not alone – pas du tout! It was accompanied by the most heavenly of butters which flung open the patio doors of my imagination. I have made herb butters in my time, even fig and tomato butters, but this (good, French) butter was mixed with aged Asiago cheese, garlic . . . and finely chopped almonds. It was a revelation.

If my reassembly of this revelation was to be anything other than Frankenstinian, I needed to track down all the perfect parts. That luscious cured pink ham with the white fat. A bread of sufficient nobility. An Asiago to match. And so Time Passed. I caught a glimpse of my dream sandwich in the ham that a friend brought me from a Polish delicatessen in North Philadelphia. As I enjoyed it with other superb Polish fare like white country cheese and beetroot horseradish, I quietly plotted to restock, smuggle it into my sandwich and pass it off as jambon. But still there was the question of the bread. Although the original sandwich had been on a baguette, I felt that a rustic white loaf with large holes and a robust crust would do just as well, perhaps even better. The story of my apprenticeship to the craft of sourdough breads will be told later, but suffice it to say that for the last 10 months I have been baking breads from a sourdough starter (a starter which I have named Mother), and they have begun to be presentable. I do not mean sourdough in the good-grief-that’s-tangy kind of way. I mean bread that doesn’t immediately strike you as a sourdough, but holds sacks of flavour in the chew – an alluring bread. I have been making bread with these ambitions, rising the loaves in willow baskets that give them floury spiral tracks on their dark crusts.

Then the other day I was buying cheese from the excellent cheese people in the Reading Terminal Market when I spotted in their cases BOTH a good-looking Asiago AND something they called “jambon Francais.” Due to bake two loaves later that afternoon, I breathlessly ordered the ham and the cheese and raced home to the dual delights of sandwiches and tennis. Now do not mistake me: I have maybe never raised a tennis racket, let alone served and volleyed in my life. My addiction to Wimbledon is two-fold, but has nothing to do with any actual relation to the sport of tennis. First, I was born in Wimbledon, at St Theresa’s Maternity Hospital, so I feel I have some peculiar rights to the sod of that genteel London suburb (this despite the fact we didn’t live there and directly after birth I was whisked away to grow up in the less salubrious suburb of Orpington - famed only for its chickens and active nudist colony). Second, the two weeks of Wimbledon fell right after the yearly batch of exams at secondary school: and watching the tournament on television was my reward - me on my tummy, the biscuit tin within arm’s reach. I have watched the tournament every year ever since. This year has been particularly exciting because of Amelie’s shot at the title. Not only is she a ripping girl herself, but it's been 81 years since a Frenchwoman won Wimbledon, and the sports programs showed charming footage of that French flapper girl jete-ing towards the net, all orange-blossom and wooden racquets. This year was an appropriate year for le sandwich.

In my fridge I discovered I still had a tangle of garlic scapes left over from my farm share. I had been tossing diced scapes in all sorts of things all week, and it struck me that they would be even more perfect than regular old adult garlic in the butter. Not only do they have a fresh, light garlic taste, but I fancied having their specks of green in the palette. Alors, en avant! I toasted about half a cup of almonds in my skillet and let them cool. Then I ground them medium-fine – enough to tame the crunch, but not so much as to render them marzipan. Then into the food processor went about 4oz of soft butter, a handful of chopped garlic scapes and a chunk of finely grated Asiago. A couple of pulses later, a taste, an adjustment for salt, and my butter was ready.

We tried the sandwich two ways: open, with just butter and ham, and then closed, with a leaf of lettuce. Both gained high scores, the winner with a line call being the one with the lettuce. I half wished I’d picked up a butter lettuce, or better still, some black seeded simpson – but I should be patient to perfect le sandwich. After all, if Amelie Mauresmo cellared a 1937 Chateau d’Yquem for seven years, waiting for her first Grand Slam title, I can potter about looking for the right little lettuce.

Digestives: A Quest

2006-07-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

Tonight, a holidayish night - one before July 4th – I made digestive biscuits. Another attempt to cull the culinary delights of the nation of my birth, and replicate them here in the nation of my adulthood.

The digestive biscuit has always occupied a comfy armchair in the kitchen of my heart. If that’s too difficult to imagine, here is a picture of my actual kitchen armchair. I feel that the digestive is sturdy of character, proffering just enough sweetness to make you feel treated, but a sweetness that is backed up by its ruggedly whole grain (before whole grains were fashionable) constitution.

It is excellent with a cup of tea after or during the workday, but also valiant as a crust to princessy toppings made of sour cream and cream cheese and summer fruits and the like. It is always there for you. It’s the biscuit that doesn’t get stolen first from the biscuit tin by furtive children and others. The biscuit I love to have brought to me by people returning from visits to the UK. My favoured brand is not actually the most popular brand, McVities, but rather Marks and Spencers. Marks & Sparks make a digestive that is crisper than others and its top has the quiet sparkle of extra sugar. On her last trip here, my mother brought me a packet (well, truth be told, three quarters of a packet) of chocolate orange digestives. These were so astrally good that they form a category of their own. My humble aim this evening was to bake me a basic digestive.

I found a recipe on the web that was only wholemeal flour and butter and sugar etc. This did not promise satisfaction. I felt that an essential ingredient must be wheatgerm, and I was also looking for some odd sort of ingredient that only factory production uses, the things you see on labels and don’t understand, but know they must contribute to the addictive yumminess of the store-made goody. When I found a recipe that included milk powder, I felt that was pretty close to such an ingredient. But I also remembered studying the packet of aforementioned chocolate orange digestives and noting “malt” as a component. My milk powder recipe had no malt, but I reckoned I could add an amount of the barley malt syrup sitting on my pantry shelves without getting into trouble. It got me thinking about malted milk powder and whether that would be better yet. But malt syrup I had to hand, so it would feature in this first draft.

The recipe was easy enough, though ends with that moment of having to add enough water to make the dough clump together. How is that when I cook such recipes they always end up requiring twice the water specified? I know it has something to do with humidity and the obstreperously, variously humectant activities of flour, but somehow I feel it has more to do with me. Can you have a dehydrated personality? The remedy to any such train of thought is, of course, a digestive biscuit, a cup of tea and a sit down. So – onward.

The dough cut out to mimic the store-bought size, B and I set about stabbing the raw biscuits with forks. She crafted our initials, “B” and “K,” while I more conservatively (dehydratedly?), poked out three rows of four tine-holes. Twenty minutes in the oven, and out came perfectly crisp brown biscuits.

They took seconds to cool and samplings of the offcuts were judged by us to be quite delicious. Less short, and less sweet too than shop ones, but honest and pleasing biscuits. Good with tea, but gooder with a plate of local (well, one state over) blueberries and some sheep's milk yogurt laced with brown sugar.

SYLLABUS: DIGESTIVE BISCUITS

11oz plain whole-wheat flour
4 tablespoons wheatgerm
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tablespoons milk powder (I used full-fat organic goat milk powder)
4 tablespoons sugar
4 1/2 oz butter
5 tablespoons cold water
1/2 tsp malt syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla

Makes about 34 biscuits if cut to about 3” diameter

Combine the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Combine the water, malt syrup and vanilla and drizzle over the dry mix.
Mix until the dough can be squeezed and it holds together. If necessary, add more water in small amounts.
Roll out either between two sheets of waxed paper, or – better – place the dough on a Silpat and then top it with a sheet of wax paper. Roll out to a thickness of 3mm/ 1/8” and then stamp out shapes. Peel away trimmings, then prick with fork.

Bake at 170C/325F/Gas Mark 3 for 20-25 minutes, taking care that they don’t over-brown.
When cool, store in air-tight container.

This recipe is not too sweet, so these would be good with cheese too.
If you want additional sweetness, try sprinkling the top of the dough with Turbinado sugar as you roll it out.

No Small Trifle

2006-07-01T11:07:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, it turns out, was the perfect trifle weekend. All the necessary fruits came ripe together. It was, in fact, a bit goblin markety. When I teach that poem I always point out that it is sinister that all those different fruits of many lands are magically "All ripe together," but my Perfect Trifle Weekend may have proved me wrong. Either that, or trifle is simply a deliciously sinister business.

I had peaches from Georgia, and organic cherries, strawberries and raspberries from right here in Eastern Pennsylvania. The lovely ladies at the Reading Terminal Market Fair Foods farm stand gallantly offered me the cheaper, non-organic raspberries, but less gallantly invited me to taste them both first -- there was no way I was going to walk away from those organic raspberries. Pricier they may have been, but they were a deeper, more velvet red than the others, and the bigger, punchier flavour did a polka on my tongue.

I staggered out of there carrying a huge cardboard box of fruits, and a full gallon of raw Jersey cream because I had TWO trifles to make.

I have big ambitions for perfecting the craft of the trifle. This is probably the 5th year in my trifle-making career, but the truth is that you only get to make a couple of trifles each year, because it's so seasonal. This time round I had a plan: to scent the custard with rose geranium leaves that we'd been growing in our small city garden. I made the custard using the delicious raw Jersey cream, into which I had steeped a shredded handful of the rose geranium leaves, and some local eggs with deep saffron-coloured yolks. It was a delicious custard. B and I kept testing it, with soup spoons. Rapturous testing session!

I'd also made some lady-fingers. A friend from my days in Vermont had visited St John, the restaurant of nose-to-tail dining fame in London. She'd returned with a delightful present for me: Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating. He includes a recipe for cherry trifle, which I didn't use that closely, but I did take his point that there is no point in laboriously piping out lady-fingers which are going to be buried in a trifle. So I made the lady-fingers by spreading the batter out on cookie sheets and baking them into folios which I then sliced into fingers once they'd cooled. He also suggested that if one wanted to be extravagant, one could use Marsala instead of sherry. Ever eager to be extravagant in the kitchen, I dug out a musty bottle of Marsala from the side-board, along with the bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream and set up a quick taste test. The sherry won: the Marsala was thin and edgy tasting. I wasn't inclined to doubt Mr Nose to Tail, but it occurred to me that I had probably bought the Marsala back when my salary was a bit on the thin side too. A check of the label confirmed this: something that calls itself "American Marsala Wine" from New York State is most likely not a fair contestant. So this particular detail of trifle construction remains open to investigation: next year I will try some good Marsala.

Having laid down and sogged my lady-fingers with 3 times the amount of booze anyone with any sense recommends, I put them aside and started halving cherries and strawberries, and skinning and slicing up the peaches. The peaches were so outrageously, Lolita-ly sexy, I had to take a photo. Look at the slick blush on it!

Once I had my fruits prepared and in separate bowls to prevent pre-trifle mingling, I set about layering. First went the cherries, then the strawberries. I privileged the edges of the bowl, so that the lusciousness of the different fruits catered to the trifle voyeur, and scattered them more lightly in the middle. Next came the raspberries, whose soft, matte and whiskery flesh contrasts so perfectly with the easy sleekness of cut peaches. The peaches topped it all off and their big, flat slices formed my custard-catching platform. I am very fussy, perhaps even neurotic, about the mobility of my trifle custard. I want it to be stiff enough to drip just a little, but not entirely. I want to see the fruits from the outside, naked and not peering through a downpour of thin custard. But there are definite logistical problems with this: a classic custard is pretty thin, no matter how long you stand and stir it, fretting over the immanent splitting you are risking. A more pedestrian, Delia Smithly custard recipe would urge you to use cornflour to prevent the curdling -- but even if you are brave of heart and scoff at such safe-players, the truth is that cornflour a stiffer custard makes. What to do? Since the trifles of my English youth were made with packet jelly and packet custard, and the trifle is after all a retro delight, I decided that cornflour has a role to play in my trifles. It alludes to the Birds Eye custard powder of yore, and also gives me that artful, seized drip I seek.

So on went the custard. Then the crushed Amaretti biscuits. I love buying the huge red bags of those, wrapped in their pretty papers. Then I whipped up more of that excellent cream, adding a few slurps of Courvoisier just to perk it up. Since I tend to the prissy, I have always dallied with the idea of piping the cream, but my beloved weighed in on the topic, pointing out that trifle is a trollopy, slumpy creature, who would be offended to be topped with the equivalent of a pill-box hat. She is right. So the cream goes on in big spoonfuls, blowsy and unconstrained.

Much fun was had with the two trifles. The rose-geranium custard was utterly lost in the mix: such a delicate scent couldn't stand up to the trumpeting flavours of the Amaretti and the sherry. So I will return to vanilla-bean custards for future trifles and save rose geranium custard-making for when I want ice-cream. Subtlety may have no place in the trifle bowl, but once the helpings and second-helpings of trifle are consumed, we always follow them with a performance of extreme delicacy: we roll the saved Amaretti papers into tubes, turn out the lights and set fire to their top edge. They dissolve into a column of lacy blue and green flames and finally, just when you think it's through, they lift gently and certainly into the air like a wisp of singed nothingness. So magical is it, your most stolid of guests may cry out with the delight of a small child.

SYLLABUS: TRIFLE
Makes one large trifle. Large = a bowl that is about 10" in diameter, and about 5" high.

LADY-FINGERS

2/3 cup / 2.5oz / 70g sifted cake flour
3 large eggs, separated, room temp
1/2 cup / 3.5oz / 100g plus 1 tblsp granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt

Makes enough for 2 trifles.
Can be made in advance.

Line two cookie sheets with Silpat/baking parchment/butter and flour

Preheat oven to 300F / 150C

In the large bowl of an electric mixer, beat egg yolks with the 1/2 cup of the sugar and the vanilla, until the mixture is thick and light-coloured and forms a flat ribbon falling back upon itself. Once or twice, stop the mixer and scrape down the sides.

With a clean bowl and beater, whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until foamy. Add remaining 1tblsp of sugar and whip until the whites are stiff but not dry. This stage is signaled when you can turn the bowl upside down and the whites stay put.

Using a rubber spatula, scoop 1/4 of the whites into the yolk mixture and fold them lightly together. Don’t overmix – streaks of the whites should remain. Sift about 1/4 of the flour over the whipped batter, fold the mix over itself a couple of times, then add another 1/4 of the whites and fold gently. Repeat, until all flour and whites are used and you can still see those streaks.

This is the point at which you would get out your piping bag for regular lady-fingers. If you want to do that, pipe fingers that are 3-3.5” long and 1” apart. Then sift them with confectioner’s/icing sugar. For trifle, simply evenly divide the mixture between the two cookie sheets and gently spread into thin sheets. Dust with the icing sugar and bake for about 15-20 minutes until lightly golden.

Remove from oven, cool and then slice into fingers.

CUSTARD

Makes enough for 1 large trifle
Best made a day in advance to give it time to cool.

450ml / 2 cups full-fat milk
450ml / 2 cups double/heavy cream
1 vanilla pod, split lengthways scraped
6 egg yolks
175g / 6oz / scant cup of caster/granulated sugar
2 tblsp cornflour/cornstarch

Place milk, cream and vanilla pod/seeds into a saucepan and bring to the boil.
In a large bowl, whisk the yolks with the sugar and cornflour until smooth and pale.
Pour the boiled cream/milk/vanilla mixture over the egg yolks, trickling at first, whisking all the time to temper the eggs.
Return the mix to the saucepan (some people think you should rinse it first), then cook over a gentle heat, whisking or stirring with a wooden spoon until it thickens sufficiently to coat the back of a spoon. Do not boil your custard – it will split. If it looks suspiciously curdle-y, lift it off the heat and whisk firmly.
Pass through a fine sieve and cool thoroughly in the fridge.

ASSEMBLY

Cut up large quantities of the best soft fruits available. I like strawberries, raspberries, peaches and cherries best. But blueberries are also very good. Strawberries and cherries should be halved, raspberries and blueberries left whole, and peaches should be skinned and sliced. Skin peaches by slashing the skin a couple of times, then dunking briefly in boiling hot water. Lift out, rinse under cold water and slip off the skins.

Layer lady-fingers in the bottom of your trifle bowl. Douse them with as much sherry or Marsala as you see fit. They really should be moist, not dry.
Then start layering your fruits.
After the last layer of fruit, spread over the custard. I prefer to not spread it completely to the edges – leave about 1/4” and it will spread itself perfectly.
Now unwrap and crush about 12 Amaretti cookies. Save those papers! Spread the crumbs evenly over the custard. Again, I tend to stop short of about 1/4” from the edge of the custard – so that the Amaretti crumbs don’t fall down the sides of the trifle bowl.

Now whip about 1.5 cups/ 350ml of double/heavy cream. You can add a little brandy if you like. Spread over the entire affair. Some people like to decorate their trifle with toasted sliced almonds. You could also use a handful of left-over whole fruit. Or – just leave plain. As soon as you dig into the trifle, and serve it up, it will all collapse anyway – there is no such thing as an elegant serving of trifle. For that, you would need to make individual trifles, which some restaurants do, but it definitely detracts from the debauchery.